The Magicians

BROOKLYN

Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.

They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.

“Okay!” James said over his shoulder. “Q. Let’s talk strategy.”

James seemed to have a sixth sense for when Quentin was starting to feel sorry for himself. Quentin’s interview was in seven minutes. James was right after him.

“Nice firm handshake. Lots of eye contact. Then when he’s feeling comfortable, you hit him with a chair and I’ll break his password and e-mail Princeton.”

“Just be yourself, Q,” Julia said.

Her dark hair was pulled back in a wavy bunch. Somehow it made it worse that she was always so nice to him.

“How is that different from what I said?”

Quentin did the magic trick again. It was a very small trick, a basic one-handed sleight with a nickel. He did it in his coat pocket where nobody could see. He did it again, then he did it backward.

“I have one guess for his password,” James said. “Password.”

It was kind of incredible how long this had been going on, Quentin thought. They were only seventeen, but he felt like he’d known James and Julia forever. The school systems in Brooklyn sorted out the gifted ones and shoved them together, then separated the ridiculously brilliant ones from the merely gifted ones and shoved them together, and as a result they’d been bumping into each other in the same speaking contests and regional Latin exams and tiny, specially convened ultra-advanced math classes since elementary school. The nerdiest of the nerds. By now, their senior year, Quentin knew James and Julia better than he knew anybody else in the world, not excluding his parents, and they knew him. Everybody knew what everybody else was going to say before they said it. Everybody who was going to sleep with anybody else had already done it. Julia — pale, freckled, dreamy Julia, who played the oboe and knew even more physics than he did — was never going to sleep with Quentin.

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first. His shoulder-length hair was freezing in clumps. He should have stuck around to dry it after gym, especially with his interview today, but for some reason — maybe he was in a self-sabotaging mood — he hadn’t. The low gray sky threatened snow. It seemed to Quentin like the world was offering up special little tableaux of misery just for him: crows perched on power lines, stepped-in dog shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innumerable wet oak leaves being desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles and pedestrians.

“God, I’m full,” James said. “I ate too much. Why do I always eat too much?”

“Because you’re a greedy pig?” Julia said brightly. “Because you’re tired of being able to see your feet? Because you’re trying to make your stomach touch your penis?”

James put his hands behind his head, his fingers in his wavy chestnut hair, his camel cashmere coat wide open to the November cold, and belched mightily. Cold never bothered him. Quentin felt cold all the time, like he was trapped in his own private individual winter.

James sang, to a tune somewhere between “Good King Wenceslas” and “Bingo”:

“God!” Julia shrieked. “Stop!”

James had written this song five years ago for a middle-school talent show skit. He still liked to sing it; by now they all knew it by heart. Julia shoved him, still singing, into a garbage can, and when that didn’t work she snatched off his watch cap and started beating him over the head with it.

“My hair! My beautiful interview hair!”

King James, Quentin thought. Le roi s’amuse.

“I hate to break up the party,” he said, “but we’ve got like two minutes.”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” Julia twittered. “The duchess! We shall be quite late!”

I should be happy, Quentin thought. I’m young and alive and healthy. I have good friends. I have two reasonably intact parents — viz., Dad, an editor of medical textbooks, and Mom, a commercial illustrator with ambitions, thwarted, of being a painter. I am a solid member of the middle-middle class. My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be.

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.

He followed James and Julia past bodegas, laundromats, hipster boutiques, cell-phone stores limned with neon piping, past a bar where old people were already drinking at three forty-five in the afternoon, past a brown-brick Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with plastic patio furniture on the sidewalk in front of it. All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead.

Maybe his real life would turn up in Princeton. He did the trick with the nickel in his pocket again.

“Are you playing with your wang, Quentin?” James asked.

Quentin blushed.

“I am not playing with my wang.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of.” James clapped him on the shoulder. “Clears the mind.”

The wind bit through the thin material of Quentin’s interview suit, but he refused to button his overcoat. He let the cold blow through it. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t really there anyway.

He was in Fillory.

Christopher Plover’s Fillory and Further is a series of five novels published in England in the 1930s. They describe the adventures of the five Chatwin children in a magical land that they discover while on holiday in the countryside with their eccentric aunt and uncle. They aren’t really on holiday, of course — their father is up to his hips in mud and blood at Passchendaele, and their mother has been hospitalized with a mysterious illness that is probably psychological in nature, which is why they’ve been hastily packed off to the country for safekeeping.

But all that unhappiness takes place far in the background. In the foreground, every summer for three years, the children leave their various boarding schools and return to Cornwall, and each time they do they find their way into the secret world of Fillory, where they have adventures and explore magical lands and defend the gentle creatures who live there against the various forces that menace them. The strangest and most persistent of those enemies is a veiled figure known only as the Watcherwoman, whose horological enchantments threaten to stall time itself, trapping all of Fillory at five o’clock on a particularly dreary, drizzly afternoon in late September.

Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. Unlike most people — unlike James and Julia — he never got over them. They were where he went when he couldn’t deal with the real world, which was a lot. (The Fillory books were both a consolation for Julia not loving him and also probably a major reason why she didn’t.) And it was true, there was a strong whiff of the English nursery about them, and he felt secretly embarrassed when he got to the parts about the Cozy Horse, an enormous, affectionate equine creature who trots around Fillory by night on velvet hooves, and whose back is so broad you can sleep on it.

But there was a more seductive, more dangerous truth to Fillory that Quentin couldn’t let go of. It was almost like the Fillory books — especially the first one, The World in the Walls—were about reading itself. When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slips through into Fillory (Quentin always pictured him awkwardly pushing aside the pendulum, like the uvula of a monstrous throat), it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.

The world Martin discovers in the walls of his aunt’s house is a world of magical twilight, a landscape as black and white and stark as a printed page, with prickly stubblefields and rolling hills crisscrossed by old stone walls. In Fillory there’s an eclipse every day at noon, and seasons can last for a hundred years. Bare trees scratch at the sky. Pale green seas lap at narrow white beaches made of broken shells. In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn’t in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.

They stood on the sidewalk in front of the house. The neighborhood was fancier here, with wide sidewalks and overhanging trees. The house was brick, the only unattached residential structure in a neighborhood of row houses and brownstones. It was locally famous for having played a role in the bloody, costly Battle of Brooklyn. It seemed to gently reproach the cars and streetlights around it with memories of its gracious Old Dutch past.

If this were a Fillory novel — Quentin thought, just for the record — the house would contain a secret gateway to another world. The old man who lived there would be kindly and eccentric and drop cryptic remarks, and then when his back was turned Quentin would stumble on a mysterious cabinet or an enchanted dumbwaiter or whatever, through which he would gaze with wild surmise on the clean breast of another world.

But this wasn’t a Fillory novel.

“So,” Julia said. “Give ’em Hades.”

She wore a blue serge coat with a round collar that made her look like a French schoolgirl.

“See you at the library maybe.”

“Cheers.”

They bumped fists. She dropped her gaze, embarrassed. She knew how he felt, and he knew she knew, and there was nothing more to say about it. He waited, pretending to be fascinated by a parked car, while she kissed James good-bye — she put a hand on his chest and kicked up her heel like an old-timey starlet — then he and James walked slowly up the cement path to the front door.

James put his arm around Quentin’s shoulders.

“I know what you think, Quentin,” he said gruffly. Quentin was taller, but James was broader, more solidly built, and he pulled Quentin off balance. “You think nobody understands you. But I do.” He squeezed Quentin’s shoulder in an almost fatherly way. “I’m the only one who does.”

Quentin said nothing. You could envy James, but you couldn’t hate him, because along with being handsome and smart he was also, at heart, kind and good. More than anybody else Quentin had ever met, James reminded him of Martin Chatwin. But if James was a Chatwin, what did that make Quentin? The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.

Quentin rang the doorbell. A soft, tinny clatter erupted somewhere in the depths of the darkened house. An old-fashioned, analog ring. He rehearsed a mental list of his extracurriculars, personal goals, etc. He was absolutely prepared for this interview in every possible way, except maybe his incompletely dried hair, but now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on.

The doorway was guarded by a depressingly ordinary suburban screen door. Orange and purple zinnias were still blooming, against all horticultural logic, in a random scatter pattern in black earth beds on either side of the doorstep. How weird, Quentin thought, with no curiosity at all, that they would still be alive in November. He withdrew his ungloved hands into the sleeves of his coat and placed the ends of the sleeves under his arms. Even though it felt cold enough to snow, somehow it began to rain.

It was still raining five minutes later. Quentin knocked on the door again, then pushed lightly. It opened a crack, and a wave of warm air tumbled out. The warm, fruity smell of a stranger’s house.

“Hello?” Quentin called. He and James exchanged glances. He pushed the door all the way open.

“Better give him another minute.”

“Who even does this in their spare time?” Quentin said. “I bet he’s a pedophile.”

The foyer was dark and silent and muffled with Oriental rugs. Still outside, James leaned on the doorbell. No one answered.

“I don’t think anybody’s here,” Quentin said. That James wasn’t coming inside suddenly made him want to go inside more. If the interviewer actually turned out to be a gatekeeper to the magical land of Fillory, he thought, it was too bad he wasn’t wearing more practical shoes.

A staircase went up. On the left was a stiff, unused-looking dining room, on the right a cozy den with leather armchairs and a carved, man-size wooden cabinet standing by itself in a corner. Interesting. An old nautical map taller than he was took up half of one wall, with an ornately barbed compass rose. He massaged the walls in search of a light switch. There was a cane chair in one corner, but he didn’t sit.

All the blinds were drawn. The quality of the darkness was less like a house with the curtains drawn than it was like actual night, as if the sun had set or been eclipsed the moment he crossed the threshold. Quentin slow-motion-walked into the den. He’d go back outside and call. In another minute. He had to at least look. The darkness was like a prickling electric cloud around him.

The cabinet was enormous, so big you could climb into it. He placed his hand on its small, dinged brass knob. It was unlocked. His fingers trembled. Le roi s’amuse. He couldn’t help himself. It felt like the world was revolving around him, like his whole life had been leading up to this moment.

It was a liquor cabinet. A big one, there was practically a whole bar in there. Quentin reached back past the ranks of softly jingling bottles and felt the dry, scratchy plywood at the back just to make sure. Solid. Nothing magical about it. He closed the door, breathing hard, his face burning in the darkness. It was when he looked around to make absolutely sure that nobody was watching that he saw the dead body on the floor.

Fifteen minutes later the foyer was full of people and activity. Quentin sat in a corner, in the cane chair, like a pallbearer at the funeral of somebody he’d never met. He kept the back of his skull pressed firmly against the cool solid wall like it was his last point of connection to a same reality. James stood next to him. He didn’t seem to know where to put his hands. They didn’t look at each other.

The old man lay flat on his back on the floor. His stomach was a sizable round hump, his hair a crazy gray Einstein half-noggin. Three paramedics crouched around him, two men and a woman. The woman was disarmingly, almost inappropriately pretty — she looked out of place in that grim scene, miscast. The paramedics were at work, but it wasn’t the high-speed clinical blitz of an emergency life-saving treatment. This was the other kind, the obligatory failed resuscitation. They were murmuring in low voices, packing up, ripping off adhesive patches, discarding contaminated sharps in a special container.

With a practiced, muscular movement one of the men de-intubated the corpse. The old man’s mouth was open, and Quentin could see his dead gray tongue. He smelled something that he didn’t want to admit was the faint, bitter odor of shit.

“This is bad,” James said, not for the first time.

“Yes,” Quentin said thickly. “Extremely bad.” His lips and teeth felt numb.

If he didn’t move, nobody could involve him in this any further. He tried to breathe slowly and keep still. He stared straight ahead, refusing to focus his eyes on what was happening in the den. He knew if he looked at James he would only see his own mental state reflected back at him in an infinite corridor of panic that led nowhere. He wondered when it would be all right for them to leave. He couldn’t get rid of a feeling of shame that he was the one who went into the house uninvited, as if that had somehow caused the man’s death.

“I shouldn’t have called him a pedophile,” Quentin said out loud. “That was wrong.”

“Extremely wrong,” James agreed. They spoke slowly, like they were both trying out language for the very first time.

One of the paramedics, the woman, stood up from where she was squatting by the body. Quentin watched her stretch, heels of her hands pressed to her lumbar region, tipping her head one way, then the other. Then she walked over in their direction, stripping off rubber gloves.

“Well,” she announced cheerfully, “he’s dead!” By her accent she was English.

Quentin cleared his clotted throat. The woman chucked the gloves neatly into the trash from across the room.

“What happened to him?”

“Cerebral hemorrhage. Nice quick way to go, if you have to go. Which he did. He must have been a drinker.”

She made the drinky-drinky gesture.

Her cheeks were flushed from crouching down over the body. She might have been twenty-five at most, and she wore a dark blue short-sleeved button-down shirt, neatly pressed, with one button that didn’t match: a stewardess on the connecting flight to hell. Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in some ways — you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability. But she was not unpretty. She was pale and thin and unreasonably lovely, with a broad, ridiculously sexy mouth.

“Well.” Quentin didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” she said. “Did you kill him?”

“I’m just here for an interview. He did alumni interviews for Princeton.”

“So why do you care?”

Quentin hesitated. He wondered if he’d misunderstood the premise of this conversation. He stood up, which he should have done when she first came over anyway. He was much taller than her. Even under the circumstances, he thought, this person is carrying around a lot of attitude for a paramedic. It’s not like she’s a real doctor or anything. He wanted to scan her chest for a name tag but didn’t want to get caught looking at her breasts.

“I don’t actually care about him, personally,” Quentin said carefully, “but I do place a certain value on human life in the abstract. So even though I didn’t know him, I think I can say that I’m sorry that he’s dead.”

“What if he was a monster? Maybe he really was a pedophile.”

She’d overheard him.

“Maybe. Maybe he was a nice guy. Maybe he was a saint.”

“Maybe.”

“You must spend a lot of time around dead people.” Out of the corner of his eye he was vaguely aware that James was watching this exchange, baffled.

“Well, you’re supposed to keep them alive. Or that’s what they tell us.”

“It must be hard.”

“The dead ones are a lot less trouble.”

“Quieter.”

“Exactly.”

The look in her eyes didn’t quite match what she was saying. She was studying him.

“Listen,” James cut in. “We should probably go.”

“What’s your hurry?” she said. Her eyes hadn’t left Quentin’s. Unlike practically everybody, she seemed more interested in him than in James. “Listen, I think this guy might have left something for you.”

She picked up two manila envelopes, document-size, off a marble-topped side table. Quentin frowned.

“I don’t think so.”

“We should probably go,” James said.

“You said that already,” the paramedic said.

James opened the door. The cold air was a pleasant shock. It felt real. That was what Quentin needed: more reality. Less of this, whatever this was.

“Seriously,” the woman said. “I think you should take these. It might be important.”

Her eyes wouldn’t leave Quentin’s face. The day had gone still around them. It was chilly on the stoop, and getting a little damp, and he was roughly ten yards away from a corpse.

“Listen, we’re gonna go,” James was saying. “Thanks. I’m sure you did everything you could.”

The pretty paramedic’s dark hair was in two heavy ropes of braid. She wore a shiny yellow enamel ring and some kind of fancy silver antique wristwatch. Her nose and chin were tiny and pointy. She was a pale, skinny, pretty angel of death, and she held two manila envelopes with their names on them in block Magic Marker letters. Probably transcripts, confidential recommendations. For some reason, maybe just because he knew James wouldn’t, Quentin took the one with his name on it.

“All right! Good-bye!” the paramedic sang. She twirled back into the house and closed the door. They were alone on the stoop.

“Well,” James said. He inhaled through his nose and breathed out firmly.

Quentin nodded, as if he were agreeing with something James had said. Slowly they walked back up the path to the sidewalk. He still felt dazed. He didn’t especially want to talk to James.

“Listen,” James said. “You probably shouldn’t have that.”

“I know,” Quentin said.

“You could still put it back, you know. I mean, what if they found out?”

“How would they find out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who knows what’s in here? Could come in useful.”

“Yeah, well, lucky thing that guy died then!” James said irritably.

They walked to the end of the block without speaking, annoyed at each other and not wanting to admit it. The slate sidewalk was wet, and the sky was white with rain. Quentin knew he probably shouldn’t have taken the envelope. He was pissed at himself for taking it and pissed at James for not taking his.

“Look, I’ll see you later,” James said. “I gotta go meet Jules at the library.”

“Right.”

They shook hands formally. It felt strangely final. Quentin walked away slowly down First Street. A man had died in the house he just left. He was still in a dream. He realized — more shame — that underneath it all he was relieved that he didn’t have to do his Princeton interview today after all.

The day was darkening. The sun was setting already behind the gray shell of cloud that covered Brooklyn. For the first time in an hour he thought about all the things he had left to do today: physics problem set, history paper, e-mail, dishes, laundry. The weight of them was dragging him back down the gravity well of the ordinary world. He would have to explain to his parents what happened, and they would, in some way he could never grasp, and therefore could never properly rebut, make him feel like it was his fault. It would all go back to normal. He thought of Julia and James meeting at the library. She would be working on her Western Civ paper for Mr. Karras, a six-week project she would complete in two sleepless days and nights. As ardently as he wished that she were his, and not James’s, he could never quite imagine how he would win her. In the most plausible of his many fantasies James died, unexpectedly and painlessly, leaving Julia behind to sink softly weeping into his arms.

As he walked Quentin unwound the little red-threaded clasp that held shut the manila envelope. He saw immediately that it wasn’t his transcript, or an official document of any kind. The envelope held a notebook. It was old-looking, its corners squashed and rubbed till they were smooth and round, its cover foxed.

The first page, handwritten in ink, read:

The Magicians

Book Six of Fillory and Further

The ink had gone brown with age. The Magicians was not the name of any book by Christopher Plover that Quentin knew of. And any good nerd knew that there were only five books in the Fillory series.

When he turned the page a piece of white notepaper, folded over once, flew out and slipped away on the wind. It clung to a wrought-iron area fence for a second before the wind whipped it away again.

There was a community garden on the block, a triangular snippet of land too narrow and weirdly shaped to be snapped up by developers. With its ownership a black hole of legal ambiguity, it had been taken over years ago by a collective of enterprising neighbors who had trucked out the acid sand native to Brooklyn and replaced it with rich, fertile loam from upstate. For a while they’d raised pumpkins and tomatoes and spring bulbs and raked out little Japanese serenity gardens, but lately they’d neglected it, and hardy urban weeds had taken root instead. They were running riot and strangling their frailer, more exotic competitors. It was into this tangled thicket that the note flew and disappeared.

This late in the year all the plants were dead or dying, even the weeds, and Quentin waded into them hip-deep, dry stems catching on his pants, his leather shoes crunching brown broken glass. It crossed his mind that the note might just possibly contain the hot paramedic’s phone number. The garden was narrow, but it went surprisingly far back. There were three or four sizable trees in it, and the farther in he pushed the darker and more overgrown it got.

He caught a glimpse of the note, up high, plastered against a trellis encrusted with dead vines. It could clear the back fence before he caught up with it. His phone rang: his dad. Quentin ignored it. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw something flit past behind the bracken, large and pale, but when he turned his head it was gone. He pushed past the corpses of gladiolas, petunias, shoulder-high sunflowers, rosebushes — brittle, stiff stems and flowers frozen in death into ornate toile patterns.

He would have thought he’d gone all the way through to Seventh Avenue by now. He shoved his way even deeper in, brushing up against who knew what toxic flora. A case of poison fucking ivy, that’s all he needed now. It was odd to see that here and there among the dead plants a few vital green stalks still poked up, drawing sustenance from who knew where. He caught a whiff of something sweet in the air.

He stopped. All of a sudden it was quiet. No car horns, no stereos, no sirens. His phone had stopped ringing. It was bitter cold, and his fingers were numb. Turn back or go on? He squeezed farther in through a hedge, closing his eyes and squinching up his face against the scratchy twigs. He stumbled over something, an old stone. He felt suddenly nauseous. He was sweating.

When he opened his eyes again he was standing on the edge of a huge, wide, perfectly level green lawn surrounded by trees. The smell of ripe grass was overpowering. There was hot sun on his face.

The sun was at the wrong angle. And where the hell were the clouds? The sky was a blinding blue. His inner ear spun sickeningly. He held his breath for a few seconds, then expelled freezing winter air from his lungs and breathed in warm summer air in its place. It was thick with floating pollen. He sneezed.

In the middle distance beyond the wide lawn a large house stood, all honey-colored stone and gray slate, adorned with chimneys and gables and towers and roofs and sub-roofs. In the center, over the main house, was a tall, stately clock tower that struck even Quentin as an odd addition to what otherwise looked like a private residence. The clock was in the Venetian style: a single barbed hand circling a face with twenty-four hours marked on it in Roman numerals. Over one wing rose what looked like the green oxidized-copper dome of an observatory. Between house and lawn was a series of inviting landscaped terraces and spinneys and hedges and fountains.

Quentin was pretty sure that if he stood very still for a few seconds everything would snap back to normal. He wondered if he was undergoing some dire neurological event. He looked cautiously back over his shoulder. There was no sign of the garden behind him, just some big leafy oak trees, the advance guard of what looked like a pretty serious forest. A rill of sweat ran down his rib cage from his left armpit. It was hot.

Quentin dropped his bag on the turf and shrugged out of his overcoat. A bird chirped languidly in the silence. Fifty feet away a tall skinny teenager was leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette and watching him.

He looked about Quentin’s age. He wore a button-down shirt with a sharp collar and very thin, very pale pink stripes. He didn’t look at Quentin, just dragged on his cigarette and exhaled into the summer air. The heat didn’t seem to bother him.

“Hey,” Quentin called.

Now he looked over. He raised his chin at Quentin, once, but didn’t answer.

Quentin walked over, as nonchalantly as he could. He really didn’t want to look like somebody who had no idea what was going on. Even without his coat on he was sweating like a bastard. He felt like an overdressed English explorer trying to impress a skeptical tropical native. But there was something he had to ask.

“Is this—?” Quentin cleared his throat. “So is this Fillory?” He squinted against the bright sun.

The young man looked at Quentin very seriously. He took another long drag on his cigarette, then he shook his head slowly, blowing out the smoke.

“Nope,” he said. “Upstate New York.”

BRAKEBILLS

He didn’t laugh. Quentin would appreciate that later.

“Upstate?” Quentin said. “What, like Vassar?”

“I saw you come through,” the young man said. “Come on, you need to go up to the House.”

He snapped the cigarette away and set off across the wide lawn. He didn’t look back to see if Quentin was following, which at first Quentin didn’t, but then a sudden fear of being left alone in this place got him moving and he trotted to catch up.

The green was enormous, the size of half a dozen football fields. It seemed to take them forever to get across it. The sun beat on the back of Quentin’s neck.

“So what’s your name?” the young man asked, in a tone that made sure Quentin knew that he had no interest in the answer.

“Quentin.”

“Charming. From?”

“Brooklyn.”

“How old?”

“Seventeen.”

“I’m Eliot. Don’t tell me anything else, I don’t want to know. Don’t want to get attached.”

Quentin had to take a couple of double-time steps to keep up with Eliot. There was something off about Eliot’s face. His posture was very straight, but his mouth was twisted to one side, in a permanent half grimace that revealed a nest of teeth sticking both in and out at improbable angles. He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.

But despite his odd appearance Eliot had an air of effortless self-possession that made Quentin urgently want to be his friend, or maybe just be him period. He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world — he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.

“So what is this place?” Quentin asked. “Do you live here?”

“You mean here at Brakebills?” he said airily. “Yes, I guess I do.” They had reached the far side of the grass. “If you can call it living.”

Eliot led Quentin through a gap in a tall hedge and into a leafy, shadowy labyrinth. The bushes had been trimmed precisely into narrow, branching, fractally ramifying corridors that periodically opened out onto small shady alcoves and courtyards. The shrubbery was so dense that no light penetrated through it, but here and there a heavy yellow stripe of sun fell across the path from above. They passed a plashing fountain here, a somber, rain-ravaged white stone statue there.

It was a good five minutes before they stepped out of the maze, through an opening flanked by two towering topiary bears reared up on their hind legs, onto a stone terrace in the shadow of the large house Quentin had seen from a distance. A breeze made one of the tall, leafy bears seem to turn its head slightly in his direction.

“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there”—he pointed to a weathered stone bench, like he was telling an overly affectionate dog to stay—“and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”

Eliot disappeared back into the hedge maze, and Quentin sat down obediently on the bench. He stared down between his shiny black interview shoes at the gray stone tiles, his backpack and his overcoat in his lap. This is impossible, he thought lucidly; he thought the words in his mind, but they got no purchase on the world around him. He felt like he was having a not-unpleasant drug experience. The tiles were intricately carved with a pattern of twiny vines, or possibly elaborately calligraphic words that had been worn away into illegibility. Little motes and seeds drifted around in the sunlight. If this is a hallucination, he thought, it’s pretty damn hi-res.

The silence was the strangest part of it. As hard as he listened he couldn’t hear a single car. It felt like he was in a movie where the sound track had abruptly cut out.

A pair of French doors rattled a few times and then opened. A tall, fat man wearing a seersucker suit strode out onto the terrace.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “You would be Quentin Coldwater.”

He spoke very correctly, as if he wished he had an English accent but wasn’t quite pretentious enough to affect one. He had a mild, open face and thin blond hair.

“Yes, sir.” Quentin had never called an adult — or anybody else — sir in his life, but it suddenly felt appropriate.

“Welcome to Brakebills College,” the man said. “I suppose you’ve heard of us?”

“Actually no,” Quentin said.

“Well, you’ve been offered a Preliminary Examination here. Do you accept?”

Quentin didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t one of the questions he’d prepped for when he got up this morning.

“I don’t know,” he said, blinking. “I mean, I guess I’m not sure.”

“Perfectly understandable response, but not an acceptable one, I’m afraid. I need a yes or a no. It’s just for the Exam,” he added helpfully.

Quentin had a powerful intuition that if he said no, all of this would be over before the syllable was even fully out of his mouth, and he would be left standing in the cold rain and dog shit of First Street wondering why he’d seemed to feel the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck for a second just then. He wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.

“Sure, okay,” he said, not wanting to sound too eager. “Yeah.”

“Splendid.” He was one of those superficially jolly people whose jolliness didn’t quite reach all the way up to his eyes. “Let’s get you Examined. My name is Henry Fogg — no jokes please, I’ve heard them all — and you may address me as Dean. Follow me. You’re the last one to arrive, I think,” he added.

No jokes actually came to Quentin’s mind. Inside the house it was hushed and cool, and there was a rich, spicy smell in the air of books and Oriental carpets and old wood and tobacco. The Dean walked ahead of him impatiently. It took Quentin a minute for his eyes to adjust. They hurried through a sitting room hung with murky oil paintings, down a narrow wood-paneled hallway, then up several flights of stairs to a heavy-timbered wooden door.

The instant it opened hundreds of eyes flicked up and fixed themselves on Quentin. The room was long and airy and full of individual wooden desks arranged in rows. At each desk sat a serious-looking teenager. It was a classroom, but not the kind Quentin was used to, where the walls were cinder block and covered with bulletin boards and posters with kittens hanging from branches with HANG IN THERE, BABY under them in balloon letters. The walls of this room were old stone. It was full of sunlight, and it stretched back and back and back. It looked like a trick with mirrors.

Most of the kids were Quentin’s age and appeared to occupy his same general stratum of coolness or lack thereof. But not all. There were a few punks with mohawks or shaved heads, and there was a substantial goth contingent and one of those super Jews, a Hasid. A too-tall girl with too-big red-framed glasses beamed goofily at everybody. A few of the younger girls looked like they’d been crying. One kid had no shirt on and green and red tattoos all over his back. Jesus, Quentin thought, whose parents would let them do that? Another was in a motorized wheelchair. Another was missing his left arm. He wore a dark button-down shirt with one sleeve folded up and held closed with a silver clasp.

All the desks were identical, and on each one an ordinary blank blue test booklet was laid out with a very thin, very sharp No. 3 pencil next to it. It was the first thing Quentin had seen here that was familiar. There was one empty seat, toward the back of the room, and he sat down and scooched his chair forward with a deafening screech. He almost thought he saw Julia’s face in among the crowd, but she turned away almost immediately, and anyway there was no time. At the front of the room Dean Fogg cleared his throat primly.

“All right,” he said. “A few preliminaries. There will be silence during the Examination. You are free to look at other students’ papers, but you will find that they appear to you to be blank. Your pencils will not require additional sharpening. If you would like a glass of water, just hold up three fingers above your head, like this.” He demonstrated.

“Do not worry about feeling unprepared for the Examination. There is no way to study for it, though it would be equally true to say that you have been preparing for it your whole lives. There are only two possible grades, Pass and Fail. If you pass, you will proceed to the second stage of the Examination. If you fail, and most of you will, you will be returned to your homes with a plausible alibi and very little memory of this entire experience.

“The duration of the test is two and one half hours. Begin.”

The Dean turned to the blackboard and drew a clock face on it. Quentin looked down at the blank booklet on his desk. It was no longer blank. It was filling with questions; the letters literally swam into being on the paper as he watched.

The room filled with a collective rustling of paper, like a flock of birds taking off. Heads bowed in unison. Quentin recognized this motion. It was the motion of a bunch of high-powered type-A test killers getting down to their bloody work.

That was all right. He was one of them.

Quentin hadn’t planned on spending the rest of his afternoon — or morning, or whatever this was — taking a standardized test on an unknown subject, at an unknown educational institution, in some unknown alternate climatic zone where it was still summer. He was supposed to be in Brooklyn freezing his ass off and being interviewed by some random senior citizen, currently deceased. But the logic of his immediate circumstances was overwhelming his other concerns, however well founded they might be. He had never been one to argue with logic.

A lot of the test was calculus, pretty basic stuff for Quentin, who was so mysteriously good at math that his high school had been forced to outsource that part of his education to Brooklyn College. Nothing more hazardous than some fancy differential geometry and a few linear algebra proofs. But there were more exotic questions, too. Some of them seemed totally pointless. One of them showed him the back of a playing card — not an actual card but a drawing of the back of a playing card, mind you, featuring your standard twin angels riding bicycles — and asked him to guess what card it was. How did that make sense?

Or later on the test gave him a passage from The Tempest, then asked him to make up a fake language, and then translate the Shakespeare into the made-up language. He was then asked questions about the grammar and orthography of his made-up language, and then — honestly, what was the point? — questions about the made-up geography and culture and society of the made-up country where his made-up language was so fluently spoken. Then he had to translate the original passage from the fake language back into English, paying particular attention to any resulting distortions in grammar, word choice, and meaning. Seriously. He always gave everything he had on tests, but in this case he wasn’t totally sure what he was supposed to give.

The test also changed as he took it. The reading-comprehension section showed him a paragraph that vanished as he read it, then quizzed him on its contents. Some new kind of computerized paper — hadn’t he read somewhere that somebody was working on that? Digital ink? Amazing resolution, though. He was asked to draw a rabbit that wouldn’t keep still as he drew it — as soon as it had paws it scratched itself luxuriously and then went hopping off around the page, nibbling at the other questions, so that he had to chase it with the pencil to finish filling in the fur. He wound up pacifying it with some hastily sketched radishes and then drawing a fence around it to keep it in line.

Soon he forgot about everything else except putting a satisfactory chunk of his neat handwriting next to one question after another, appeasing whatever perverse demands the test made on him. It was an hour before he even looked up from his desk. His ass hurt. He shifted in his chair. The patches of sunlight from the windows had moved.

Something else had changed, too. When he’d started every single desk had been filled, but now there was a sprinkling of empty ones. He hadn’t noticed anybody leaving. A cold crystal seed of doubt formed in Quentin’s stomach. Jesus, they must have finished already. He wasn’t used to being outclassed in the classroom. The palms of his hands prickled with sweat, and he smeared them along his thighs. Who were these people?

When Quentin flipped to the next page of the test booklet it was blank except for a single word in the center of the page: FIN, in swirly italic type, like at the end of an old movie.

He sat back in the chair and pressed the heels of his aching hands against his aching eyes. Well, that was two hours of his life he’d never get back. Quentin still hadn’t noticed anybody getting up and walking out, but the room was getting seriously depopulated. There were maybe fifty kids left, and more empty desks than full ones. It was like they were softly and silently slipping out of the room every time he turned his head. The punk with the tattoos and no shirt was still there. He must have finished, or given up, because he was dicking around by ordering more and more glasses of water. His desktop was crowded with glasses. Quentin spent the last twenty minutes staring out the window and practicing a spinning trick with his pencil.

The Dean came in again and addressed the room.

“I’m delighted to inform you all that you will be moving on to the next stage of testing,” he said. “This stage will be conducted on an individual basis by members of the Brakebills faculty. In the meantime, you may enjoy some refreshment and converse among yourselves.”

Quentin counted only twenty-two desks still occupied, maybe a tenth of the original group. Bizarrely, a silent, comically correct butler in white gloves entered and began circulating through the room. He gave each of them a wooden tray with a sandwich — roasted red peppers and very fresh mozzarella on sourdough bread — a lumpy pear, and a thick square of dark, bitter chocolate. He poured each student a glass of something cloudy and fizzy from an individual bottle without a label. It turned out to be grapefruit soda.

Quentin took his lunch and drifted up to the front row, where most of the rest of the test takers were gathering. He felt pathetically relieved to have gotten this far, even though he had no idea why he’d passed and the others had failed, or what he’d get for passing. The butler was patiently loading the clinking, sloshing collection of water glasses from the punk’s desk onto a tray. Quentin looked for Julia, but either she hadn’t made the cut or she’d never been there in the first place.

“They should have capped it,” explained the punk, who said his name was Penny. He had a gentle moony face that was at odds with his otherwise terrifying appearance. “How much water you can ask for. Like maybe five glasses at most. I love finding shit like that, where the system screws itself with its own rules.”

He shrugged.

“Anyway, I was bored. The test told me I was done after twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?” Quentin was torn between admiration and envy. “Jesus Christ, it took me two hours.”

The punk shrugged again and made a face: What the hell do you want me to say?

Among the test takers, camaraderie warred with mistrust. Some of the kids exchanged names and home towns and cautious observations about the test, though the more they compared notes, the more they realized that none of them had taken the same one. They were from all over the country, except for two who turned out to be from the same Inuit reservation in Saskatchewan. They went around the room telling stories about how they’d gotten here. No two were exactly the same, but there was always a certain family resemblance. Somebody went looking for a lost ball in an alley, or a stray goat in a drainage ditch, or followed an inexplicable extra cable in the high school computer room which led to a server closet that had never been there before. And then green grass and summer heat and somebody to take them up to the exam room.

As soon as lunch was over teachers began poking their heads in and calling out the names of candidates. They went alphabetically, so it was only a couple of minutes before a stern woman in her forties with dark shoulder-length hair summoned Quentin Coldwater. He followed her into a narrow wood-paneled room with tall windows that looked out from a surprisingly great height onto the lawn he’d crossed earlier. Chatter from the adjacent exam room cut off abruptly when the door closed. Two chairs faced each other across a worn, hugely thick wooden table.

Quentin felt giddy, like he was watching the whole thing on TV. It was ridiculous. But he forced himself to pay attention. This was a competition, and he dominated competitions. That was what he did, and he sensed that the stakes of this one were rising. The table was bare except for a deck of cards and a stack of about a dozen coins.

“I understand you like magic tricks, Quentin,” the woman said. She had a very slight accent, European but otherwise unplaceable. Icelandic? “Why don’t you show me some?”

As a matter of fact, Quentin did like magic tricks. His interest in magic had started three years ago, partly inspired by his reading habits but mostly as a way of fattening up his extracurriculars with an activity that wouldn’t force him to actually interact with other people. Quentin had spent hundreds of emotionally arid hours with his iPod on palming coins and shuffling cards and producing fake flowers from skinny plastic canes in a trance of boredom. He watched and rewatched grainy, porn-like instructional videotapes in which middle-aged men demonstrated close-up magic passes in front of backdrops made of bedsheets. Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.

There was a store near Quentin’s house that sold magic supplies, along with junk electronics, dusty board games, pet rocks, and fake vomit. Ricky, the man behind the counter, who had a beard and sideburns but no mustache, like an Amish farmer, grudgingly agreed to give Quentin some tips. It wasn’t long before the student surpassed the master. At seventeen Quentin knew the Scotch and Soda and the tricky one-handed Charlier cut, and he could juggle the elusive Mills Mess pattern with three balls and sometimes, for short ecstatic flights, with four. He earned a small dividend of popularity at school every time he demonstrated his ability to throw, with a fierce, robotic accuracy, an ordinary playing card sidearm so that from a distance of ten feet it stuck edge-on in one of the flavorless Styrofoamy apples they served in the cafeteria.

Quentin reached for the cards first. He was vain about his shuffling, so he broke out a faro shuffle rather than the standard riffle just in case — fat chance — the woman sitting across from him knew the difference, and how ridiculously hard it was to do a good faro.

He ran through his usual routine, which was already calculated to show off as many different skills as possible: false cuts, false shuffles, lifts, sleights, passes, forces. In between tricks he tossed and waterfalled and avalanched the cards from hand to hand. He had regular patter to go with it, but it sounded clumsy and empty in this quiet, airy, beautiful room, in front of this dignified, handsome older woman. The words trailed off. He performed in silence.

The cards made shushing, snapping noises in the stillness. The woman watched him steadily, obediently choosing a card whenever he asked her to, showing no surprise when he recovered it — against all odds! — from the middle of a thoroughly shuffled deck, or from his shirt pocket, or out of thin air.

He switched to the coins. They were fresh new nickels, nicely milled, good crisp edges. He had no props, no cups or folded handkerchiefs, so he stuck to palms and passes, flourishes and catches. The woman watched him in silence for a minute, then reached across the table and touched his arm.

“Do that one again,” she said.

He obediently did that one again. The trick was an old one, the Wandering Nickel, wherein a nickel (actually three nickels) moved mysteriously from hand to hand. He kept showing it to the audience and then cheekily vanishing it again; then he pretended to lose track of it entirely; then he triumphantly produced it again, whereupon it appeared to vanish again straight out of his open palm, in plain sight. It was actually a fairly ordinary, if well-scripted, sequence of steals and drops, with one particularly nervy retention-of-vision vanish.

“Do it again.”

He did it again. She stopped him in the middle.

“This part — there is a mistake.”

“Where?” He frowned. “That’s how you do it.”

She pursed her lips and shook her head.

The woman plucked three nickels from the stack and without an instant of hesitation, or anything in her manner that acknowledged that she was doing something special, performed the Wandering Nickel perfectly. Quentin couldn’t stop staring at her small, limber brown hands. Her movements were smoother and more precise than any professional’s he’d ever seen.

She stopped in the middle.

“See here, where the second coin must go from hand to hand? You need a reverse pass, holding it like so. Here, come around so you can see.”

He obediently trotted around to her side of the table and stood behind her, trying not to look down her blouse. Her hands were smaller than his, but the nickel vanished between her fingers like a bird into a thicket. She did the move for him slowly, backward and forward, breaking it down.

“That’s what I’m doing,” he said.

“Show me.”

Now she was openly smiling. She grasped his wrist to stop him mid-pass.

“Now. Where is the second coin?”

He held out his hands, palm up. The coin was… but there was no coin. It was gone. He turned his hands over, waggled his fingers, looked on the table, in his lap, on the floor. Nothing. It had disappeared. Did she nick it while he wasn’t looking? With those fast hands and that Mona Lisa smile, he couldn’t quite put it past her.

“It is what I thought,” she said, standing up. “Thank you, Quentin, I will send in the next examiner.”

Quentin watched her go, still patting his pockets for the missing coin. For the first time in his life he couldn’t tell if he’d passed or failed.

The whole afternoon went like that: professors parading in through one door and out the other. It was like a dream, a long, rambling dream with no obvious meaning. There was an old man with a shaky head who fumbled in his pants pockets and threw a bunch of frayed, yellowed knotted cords on the table, then stood there with a stopwatch as Quentin untied them. A shy, pretty young woman, who looked like she was barely older than Quentin, asked him to draw a map of the House and the grounds based on what he’d seen since he’d been here. A slick fellow with a huge head and who wouldn’t or couldn’t stop talking challenged him to a weird variant of blitz chess. After a while you couldn’t even take it seriously — it felt like it was his credulity that was being tested. A fat man with red hair and a self-important air released a tiny lizard with iridescent humming-bird wings and huge, alert eyes into the room. The man said nothing, just folded his arms and sat on the edge of the table, which creaked unhappily under his weight.

For lack of a better idea Quentin tried to coax the lizard to land on his finger. It flew down and nipped a tiny chunk out of his forearm, drawing a dot of blood, then zipped away and buzzed against the window like a bumblebee. The fat man silently handed Quentin a Band-Aid, collected his lizard, and left.

Finally the door closed and didn’t open again. Quentin took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Apparently the procession had ended, though nobody bothered to say anything to Quentin. At least he had a few minutes to himself. By now the sun was setting. He couldn’t see it from the exam room, but he could see a fountain, and the light reflected in the pool of the fountain was a cool burnt orange. A mist was rising up through the trees. The grounds were deserted.

He rubbed his face with his hands. His head was clearing. It occurred to him, long after it probably should have, to wonder what the hell his parents were thinking. Normally they were pretty indifferent to his comings and goings, but even they had their limits. School had been out for hours now. Maybe they thought his interview had run long, though the chances that they even remembered Quentin was supposed to have had an interview were pretty small. Or if it was summer here, maybe school hadn’t even started yet? The giddy haze he’d been lost in all afternoon was starting to dissipate. He wondered exactly how safe he was here. If this was a dream, he was going to have to wake up pretty soon.

Through the closed door he distinctly heard the sound of somebody crying: a boy, and way too old to be crying in front of other people. A teacher was speaking to him quietly and firmly, but the boy either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. He ignored it, but it was a dangerous, unmanning sound, a sound that clawed away at the outer layers of Quentin’s hard-won teenage sangfroid. Underneath it there was something like fear. The voices faded as the boy was led away. Quentin heard the Dean speaking in icy, clipped tones, trying not to sound angry.

“I’m really not sure I care one way or the other anymore.”

There was an answer, something inaudible.

“If we don’t have a Quorum we’ll simply send them all home and skip a year.” Fogg’s genteel reserve was decaying. “Nothing would make me happier. We can rebuild the observatory. We can turn the school into a nursing home for senile old professors. God knows we have enough of those.”

Inaudible.

“There is a Twentieth, Melanie. We go through this every year, and we will empty every high school and middle school and juvenile detention center till we find him or her or it. And if there isn’t I will happily resign, and it will be your problem, and you’re welcome to it. Right now I can’t think of anything that would make me happier.”

The door opened a crack, and for an instant a worried face peered in at him — it was Quentin’s first examiner, the dark-haired European lady with the clever fingers. He opened his mouth to ask about a phone — his cell was down to one useless flickering bar — but the door shut again. How annoying. Was it over? Should he just leave? He made a face to himself. He was all for adventures, God knows, but enough was enough. This one was getting old.

The room was almost dark. He looked around for a light switch, but there wasn’t one; in fact all the time he’d been here he hadn’t seen a single electrical device. No phones, no lights, no clocks. It was a long time since Quentin had had his sandwich and his square of dark chocolate, and he was hungry again. He stood up and went to the window where it was lighter.

The panes of glass were wiggly with age. Was he the last one left? What was taking so long? The sky was a luminous royal blue dome swarming with huge lazy whorls of stars, van Gogh stars that would have been invisible in Brooklyn, drowned in light pollution. He wondered how far upstate they were, and what had happened to the note he’d been chasing and never found. The book he’d left behind with his backpack in the first exam room; now he wished he’d kept it with him. He imagined his parents making dinner together in the kitchen, something steaming on the stove, his dad singing along to something nightmarishly unhip, two glasses of red wine on the counter. He almost missed them.

With no warning the door banged open and the Dean walked in, talking over his shoulder at somebody behind him.

“—a Candidate? Fine,” he said sarcastically. “Let’s see a Candidate. And bring some Goddamned candles!” He sat down at the table. His shirt was translucent with sweat. It was not impossible that he’d had a drink between now and the last time Quentin had seen him. “Hello, Quentin. Please sit.”

He indicated the other chair. Quentin sat, and Fogg rebuttoned his top button and hastily, irritably whipped a tie out of his pocket.

The dark-haired woman followed Fogg into the room, and after her came the old man with the knots, the fat man with the lizard, then the rest of the dozen or so men and women who had paraded through the room this afternoon. They formed lines along the walls, packed themselves into the corners, craning to look at him, whispering to one another. The punk kid with the tattoos was there, too — he slipped in just as the door was closing, unobserved by the faculty.

“Come on, come on.” The Dean waved them into the room. “We should really do this in the conservatory next year. Pearl, you come around here.” This to the young blond woman who’d made Quentin draw a map.

“Now,” he said when they were all inside. “Quentin. Sit, please.”

Quentin was already sitting. He scooched in his chair a little farther.

Dean Fogg took out of one pocket a fresh pack of cards, the plastic wrap still on them, and from the other he took a stack of nickels, maybe a dollar’s worth, which he put down too emphatically so that they promptly slumped over. They both reached to restack them.

“All right, let’s get to it.” Fogg clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Let’s see some magic!”

He sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

Hadn’t they already done this part? Quentin kept his face studiously calm and unworried, but his mind was in free fall. Slowly he unwrapped the stiff new cards, the plastic crackling deafeningly in the excruciating stillness, and watched from a mental mile away as his hands dutifully riffled and bridged them, riffled and bridged. He searched his brain for a trick he hadn’t already done the first time around. Somebody coughed.

He’d barely started his routine when Fogg stopped him.

“No, no-no-no-no.” Fogg chuckled, not especially kindly. “Not like that. I want to see some real magic.”

He knocked twice on the hard tabletop with his knuckles and sat back again. Quentin took a deep breath and searched Fogg’s face for the good humor he’d seen there earlier, but Fogg just watched expectantly. His eyes were a pale milky blue, paler than eyes usually were.

“I don’t really get what you mean,” Quentin said slowly, in the silence, like he’d forgotten his line in the school play and had to ask for it. “What do you mean, real magic?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Fogg shot a hilarious sideways glance at the other teachers. “I don’t know what I mean. You tell me what I mean.”

Quentin shuffled a couple more times, stalling. He didn’t know what to do. He would do anything if they would just tell him what he was supposed to do. This was it, he thought, he was coming to the end. This is what failure feels like. He looked around the room, but every face was either blank or avoiding his gaze. No one was going to help him. He was going back to Brooklyn. Maddeningly, he could feel tears pooling in his eyes. He blinked them away. He so badly wanted not to care, but he was falling backward, sinking down inside himself, and there was nothing there to catch him. This is it, he thought. This was the test he couldn’t pass. It wasn’t really all that surprising. He just wondered how long they were going to let it go on.

“Stop fucking with us, Quentin!” Fogg barked. He snapped his fingers. “Come on. Wake up!”

He reached across the table and grabbed Quentin’s hands roughly. The contact was a shock. His fingers were strong and strangely dry and hot. He was moving Quentin’s fingers, physically forcing them into positions they didn’t want to be in.

“Like this,” he was saying. “Like this. Like this.”

“Okay, stop,” Quentin said. He tried to pull away. “Stop.”

But Fogg didn’t stop. The audience shifted uncomfortably, and somebody said something. Fogg kept on working Quentin’s hands with both of his, kneading them. He bent Quentin’s fingers back, stretching them apart so that the webs between his fingers burned. Light seemed to flash between their hands.

“I said, stop it!” Quentin jerked his hands away.

It was surprising how good the anger felt. It was something to grab on to. In the shocked silence that followed he took a deep breath and forced it out through his nose. When it was out he felt like he’d expelled some of his despair with it. He’d had enough of being judged. He’d been sucking it up his whole life, but even he had his limit.

Fogg was talking again, but now Quentin wasn’t even listening. He had begun to recite something under his breath, something familiar. It took him a second to realize that the words he was mouthing weren’t English; they were from the foreign language he had invented earlier that afternoon. It was an obscure language — he’d decided — indigenous to a single tropical archipelago, a languorous hot-weather paradise, a Gauguin painting, blessed with black sand beaches and breadfruit trees and freshwater springs and endowed with an angry, glowing red volcano god and an oral culture rich in obscene expletives. He spoke this language fluently, with no accent, like a native. The words he spoke were not a prayer, exactly. More of an incantation.

Quentin stopped shuffling the cards. There was no going back. Everything snapped into very slow, slow motion, as if the room had filled up with a viscous but perfectly clear liquid in which everyone and everything floated easily and calmly. Everyone and everything except for Quentin, who moved quickly. With two hands together, as if he were releasing a dove, he tossed the deck of cards lightly up to the ceiling. The deck broke apart and scattered in flight, like a meteorite losing cohesion in the atmosphere, and as the cards fluttered back down to earth they stacked themselves on the tabletop. They formed a house of cards. It was a recognizable, if impressionistic, model of the building they were sitting in. The cards fell as if by chance, but each one perfectly, snapping into place magnetically, edge to edge, one after other. The last two, the aces of spades and hearts, leaned up against each other to make the roof over the clock tower.

Now the room was absolutely still. Dean Fogg sat as if he were frozen in place. All the hairs were standing up on Quentin’s arms, but he knew what he was doing. His fingers left almost imperceptible phosphorescent trails behind them in the air. He definitely felt high. He leaned forward and blew lightly on the card house, and it collapsed back down into a neatly stacked deck. He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a blackjack dealer. Every card was a Queen — all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn’t exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books. Some were clothed, some were shamelessly naked. Some of them had Julia’s face. Some of them had the lovely paramedic’s.

Dean Fogg watched Quentin intently. Everybody watched him. Watch this: Quentin squared the deck again and with no particular effort ripped it in half and then ripped the halves in half and tossed the resulting confetti at the assembled company, who all flinched except for Fogg.

He stood up. His chair fell over backward.

“Tell me where I am,” Quentin said softly. “Tell me what I’m doing here.”

He picked up the stack of nickels in his fist, only it was no longer a stack of coins, it was the hilt of a bright, burning sword that he drew easily out of the tabletop, as if it had been left there buried up to the hilt.

“Tell me what’s going on here,” Quentin said, louder, to the room. “And if this place isn’t Fillory, then for fuck’s sake will somebody please tell me where the hell I am?”

Quentin let the tip of the sword hover under Fogg’s nose for a slow ten-count, then he reversed his grip and stabbed it down into the wood of the table. The point bit deep into the buttery wood and stuck there.

Fogg didn’t move. The sword waggled in place. Quentin sniffed involuntarily. The last of the light from the window died. It was night.

“Well now,” the Dean said finally. He removed a neatly folded handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead. “I think we can all agree that that was a Pass.”

Somebody — it was the old guy with the knots — put a reassuring hand on Quentin’s back and gently, with surprising strength, drew the sword out of the table and laid it safely on its side. A slow patter of applause arose from the assembled examiners. It quickly turned into an ovation.

ELIOT

Afterward Quentin couldn’t remember much of the rest of that night, except that he spent it there at the school. He was exhausted, and weak, like he’d been drugged. His chest felt hollowed out and empty. He wasn’t even hungry anymore, just desperate to sleep. It was embarrassing, but nobody seemed to mind. Professor Van der Weghe — it turned out that was the dark-haired woman’s name — told him it was perfectly natural to be tired because he had just cast his first Minor Incantation, whatever that was, and that would wear anybody out. She further promised him that matters had been squared with his parents. They wouldn’t be worried. By that point Quentin barely cared, he just wanted to pass out.

He let her half lead, half carry him up approximately ten thousand flights of stairs to a small, neat room containing a very, very soft featherbed with cool white sheets. He lay down on it with his shoes still on. Ms. Van der Weghe took them off for him — it made him feel like a little kid to have somebody untie his shoes for him. She covered him up, and he was asleep before she closed the door.

The next morning it took him a long, confused minute to figure out where he was. He lay in bed, slowly piecing together his memories of the day before. It was a Friday, and by rights he should be in school now. Instead he was waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom wearing yesterday’s clothes. He felt vaguely confused and regretful, like he’d drunk too much at a party with people he didn’t know very well and fallen asleep in the host’s spare bedroom. He even had a trace of what felt like a hangover.

What exactly had happened last night? What had he done? His memories were all wrong. The events were like a dream — they had to be — but they didn’t feel like a dream. And this room wasn’t a dream. A crow cawed loudly outside and immediately stopped, as if it were embarrassed. There was no other sound.

From where he lay he took stock of the room he was in. The walls were curved — the room was in the shape of a section of a circle. The outer wall was stone; the inner was taken up with dark wooden cabinets and cubbies. There was a Victorian-looking writing desk and a dresser and a mirror. His bed was tucked into a wooden alcove. There were small vertical windows all along the outer wall. He had to admit it was a highly satisfactory room. No danger signs yet. Maybe this wasn’t a complete disaster. At any rate it was time to get up. Time to get it over with and find out what was going on.

He got up and padded over to a window. The stone floor was cool on his bare feet. It was early, a misty dawn, and he was very high up, higher than the tops of the highest trees. He had slept for ten hours. He looked down on the green lawn. It was silent and empty. He saw the crow: it drifted by below him on glossy blue-black wings.

A note on the desk informed him that he would be having breakfast with Dean Fogg at his earliest convenience. Quentin discovered a dormitory-style bathroom on the floor below, with shower stalls and rows of capacious white porcelain sinks and stacks of neatly folded scratchy white institutional towels. He washed up — the water was hot and strong, and he let it blast him till he felt clean and calm. He took a long pent-up acid-yellow piss in the shower and watched it spiral down the drain. It felt deeply weird not to be in school, to be on an adventure somewhere new, however dubious. It felt good. A mental meter in his brain was totting up the damage that his absence would be wreaking at home in Brooklyn; so far it was still within acceptable limits. He made himself as presentable as possible in his day-old, slept-in interview suit and walked downstairs.

The place was completely deserted. He hadn’t expected a formal reception, exactly, but he had to wander around for twenty minutes, through empty hallways and drawing rooms and classrooms and out onto terraces, before the white-gloved butler who’d served him his sandwich yesterday finally found him and deposited him in the Dean’s office, which was surprisingly small and mostly taken up by a presidential desk the size of a panzer tank. The walls were lined with an assortment of books and old-looking brass instruments.

The Dean arrived a minute later wearing a light green linen suit and a yellow tie. He was brusque and peppy and showed no sign of embarrassment, or any other emotion, relating to the scene the night before. He had already had breakfast, Fogg explained, but Quentin would eat while they talked.

“Now.” He clapped his hands on his knees and quirked his eyebrows. “First things first: magic is real. But you’ve probably already gotten that far.”

Quentin said nothing. He kept his face, his whole body, carefully still in his chair. He looked at a spot over Fogg’s shoulder. He was giving nothing away. Certainly it was the simplest possible explanation for what had happened last night. Part of him, the part he trusted least, wanted to leap on this idea like a puppy on a ball. But in light of everything else that had ever happened to him, in his entire life, he checked himself. He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world — he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn’t going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you’d buried and mourned wasn’t really dead after all.

He let Fogg talk.

“To answer your questions of last night, you are at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.” The butler arrived with a tray crowded with covered dishes, which he busily uncovered, like a room-service waiter. “Based on your performance in the Examination yesterday, we’ve decided to offer you a place here. Try the bacon, it’s very good. Local farm, they raise the pigs on cream and walnuts.”

“You want me to go to school here. College.”

“Yes. You’d come here instead of matriculating at a conventional university. If you like it, you can even keep the room you stayed in last night.”

“But I can’t just—” Quentin didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence. “I’m sorry, this is a little confusing. So I would put off college?”

“No, Quentin. You wouldn’t put off college. You would abandon college. Brakebills would be your college.” The Dean had obviously had a lot of practice at this. “There would be no Ivy League for you. You wouldn’t go off to school with the rest of your class. You would never make Phi Beta Kappa or be recruited by a hedge fund or a management consultancy. This isn’t summer school, Quentin. This is”—he pronounced the phrase precisely, eyes wide—“ ‘the whole shebang.’ ”

“So it’s four years—”

“Five, actually.”

“—at the end of which I get what? A bachelor’s of magic?” It was actually funny. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” he said to nobody.

“At the end of which you will be a magician, Quentin. It is not the obvious career path, I know. Your guidance counselor would not approve. No one will know what you’re doing here. You would be leaving all that behind. Your friends, whatever career plans you had, everything. You would be losing one world but gaining another. Brakebills would become your world. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly.”

Well, no, it wasn’t. Quentin pushed his plate away and crossed his arms. He stalled.

“So, how did you find me?”

“Oh, we have a device for that, a globe.” Fogg indicated a shelf holding a whole menagerie of them: modern globes; blackwater globes; pale lunar globes; glittering midnight-blue celestial globes; dark, smoky, unreadable globes awash with ludicrously inaccurate continents. “It finds young people like yourself who have an aptitude for magic — essentially it senses magic being performed, often inadvertently, by unregistered sorcerers, of which you are one. I suppose it must have picked up that Wandering Nickel trick of yours.

“We have scouts, too,” he added. “Your odd friend Ricky with the whiskers is one.” He touched his jawline where Ricky’s Amish beard was.

“What about that woman I met, with the braids. The paramedic. Was she a scout, too?”

Fogg frowned. “With braids? You saw her?”

“Well, yes. Right before I came here. Didn’t you send her?”

Fogg’s face became studiously empty.

“In a manner of speaking. She’s a special case. Works on an independent basis. Freelance, you might say.”

Quentin’s mind spun. Maybe he should ask to see a brochure. And no one had said anything about tuition yet. And gift horses and all that notwithstanding, how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.

“Don’t you want to see my SATs?”

“I have,” Fogg said patiently. “And a lot more than that. But yesterday’s Exam was all we really needed. It’s very comprehensive. Admission here is quite competitive, you know. I doubt there’s a more exclusive school of any kind on the continent. We held six Exams this summer, for twenty places. Only two Passed yesterday, you and another boy, the boy with the tattoos and the hair. Penny, he says his name is. Can’t be his real name.

“This is the only magical school in North America,” Fogg went on, leaning back behind his desk. He almost seemed to be enjoying Quentin’s discomfort. “There’s one in the UK, two on the Continent, four in Asia, and so on. One in New Zealand for some reason. People talk a lot of guff about American magic, but I assure you we are quite up to the international standard. In Zurich they still teach phrenology, if you can believe that.”

Something small but heavy fell off Fogg’s desk with a clunk. He bent to retrieve it: a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching.

“Poor little thing,” he said, petting it with his large hands. “Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it’s alive, but it’s much too heavy to fly.” The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. “It’s always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.

“Now.” The Dean leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “Should you choose to matriculate here, we’ll do some minor illusion work with your parents. They can’t know about Brakebills, of course, but they’ll think you’ve been accepted to a very prestigious private institute — which isn’t at all far from the truth — and they’ll be very proud. It’s painless and quite effective, as long as you don’t say anything too obvious.

“Oh, and you’ll start right away. The semester begins in two weeks, so you’ll have to skip the rest of your senior year. But I really shouldn’t be telling you all this before we’ve done your paperwork.”

Fogg took out a pen and a fat sheaf of closely handwritten paper that looked like a treaty between two eighteenth-century nation-states.

“Penny signed yesterday,” he said. “Very quick Examination, that boy. What do you say?”

So that was it, that was the sales pitch. Fogg put the papers in front of him and held out the pen. Quentin took it, a fancy-looking metal fountain pen as thick as a cigar. His hand hovered over the page. This was ridiculous. Was he really going to throw everything away? Everything: everybody he knew, James and Julia, whatever college he would have gone to, whatever career he would have had, everything he thought he’d been getting ready for. For this? This bizarre charade, this fever dream, this fancy-dress role-playing game?

He stared out the window. Fogg watched him impassively, just waiting for him to fall for it. If he cared one way or the other, he wasn’t letting on. The little floundering metal bird, having escaped its drawer, butted its head industriously against the wainscoting.

And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin’s chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign. Jesus, what the hell was he thinking? Of course he was going to sign. This was everything he’d always wanted, the break he’d given up on years ago. It was right in front of him. He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician. Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?

“Okay,” Quentin said evenly. “All right. On one condition: I want to start now. I want to stay in that room. I don’t want to go home.”

They didn’t make him go home. Instead, his things arrived from home in a collection of duffel bags and rolly suitcases, packed by his parents, who had, as Fogg promised, somehow been squared with the idea that their only child was suddenly matriculating in the middle of the semester at a mysterious educational institution they had never visited or even heard of. Quentin slowly unpacked his clothes and his books and put them away in the cabinets and cubbies in the little curved tower room. He didn’t even want to touch them now. They were part of his old self, his old life, the one he was molting away. The only thing missing was the book, the notebook the paramedic gave him. That was nowhere to be found. He’d left it in the exam room on the assumption that he’d be going back there, but when he finally did it was gone. Dean Fogg and the butler pled ignorance.

Sitting there alone in his room, his folded clothes around him on the bed, he thought about James and Julia. God only knew what they were thinking. Did she miss him? Now that he was gone, would she realize she’d had the wrong man all along? He should probably get in touch with them somehow. Though really, what the hell could he say? He wondered what would have happened if James had taken the envelope from the paramedic too. Maybe he would have gotten to take the exam, too. Maybe that was part of the test.

He let himself unclench a little. Just slightly, he stopped bracing for the blow from above, and for the first time he seriously considered the idea that it might not come at all.

With nothing else to do Quentin roamed through the huge house, unsupervised and rudderless. The Dean and the teachers were nice enough when he ran into them, but they had their own work to do and their own problems to deal with. It was like being at a fancy beach resort during the off-season, rattling around in a grand hotel with no guests, just empty rooms and empty gardens and empty, echoing hallways. He ate his meals alone in his room and loitered in the library — naturally they had the complete works of Christopher Plover — and luxuriously contemplated, one by one, in order, each of the problem sets and projects and papers he would never have to finish. Once he found his way up to the clock tower and spent an afternoon watching the huge rusty iron pendulum sway back and forth, following the massive gears and levers and catchments as they turned and meshed, carrying out their mechanical syllogism, until the glow of the setting sun shone through the tremendous backward clock face.

Sometimes he burst out laughing out of nowhere, for no reason. He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he’d had much practice at. It was just too fucking funny. He was going to learn magic! He was either the greatest genius of all time or the biggest idiot. But at least he was actually curious about what was going to happen to him next. For the first time in he didn’t know how long he was actually following the action with interest. In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless — whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it. Brakebills was different. It mattered. Meaning — is that what magic was? — was everywhere here. The place was crawling with it. Out there he had been on the edge of serious depression, and worse, he had been in danger of learning to really dislike himself. He was on the verge of incurring the kind of inward damage you didn’t heal from, ever. But now he felt like Pinocchio, a wooden boy who was made real. Or maybe it was the other way around, he’d been turned from a real boy into something else? Either way the change was for the better. It wasn’t Fillory, but it would do.

He didn’t spend all his time alone. Once in a while he spotted Eliot from a distance, loping across the empty green or lolling with his long legs folded up in a window seat, staring out the window or leafing distractedly through a book. He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he’d been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.

One day Quentin was walking the edge of the great lawn when he came across Eliot leaning against an oak tree, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback book. It was more or less the same spot where they first met. Because of the odd way Eliot’s jaw was built, the cigarette stuck out at an angle.

“Want one?” Eliot asked politely. He stopped reading and held out a blue-and-white pack of Merit Ultra Lights. They hadn’t spoken since Quentin’s first day at Brakebills.

“They’re contraband,” he went on, not visibly disappointed that Quentin didn’t take one. “Chambers buys them for me. I once caught him in the wine cellar drinking a very good petite syrah from the Dean’s private collection. Stags’ Leap, the ninety-six. We came to an understanding. He’s really a nice fellow, I shouldn’t hold it over his head. Quite a good amateur painter, albeit in a sadly outdated realist mode. I let him paint me once — draped, thank you very much. I was holding a Frisbee. I think I was supposed to be Hyacinthus. Chambers is a pompiste at heart. Deep down I don’t think he believes Impressionism ever happened.”

Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected. It was hard to know how to respond. He summoned up all the wisdom he’d accumulated during his entire life in Brooklyn.

“Merits are for pussies,” he said.

Eliot looked at him appraisingly.

“Very true. But they’re the only cigarette I can stand. Disgusting habit. Come on, smoke one with me.”

Quentin accepted the cigarette. He was in unfamiliar territory here. He’d handled cigarettes before — they were common props in close-up magic — but he’d never actually put one in his mouth. He made the cigarette vanish — a basic thumb palm — then snapped his fingers to bring it back.

“I said smoke it, not fondle it,” Eliot said curtly.

He muttered something under his breath, then snapped his own fingers. A lighter-size flame sprang into being over the tip of his index finger. Quentin leaned in and inhaled.

It felt like his lungs had been crumpled up and then incinerated. He coughed for five solid minutes without stopping. Eliot laughed so hard he had to sit down. Quentin’s face was slick with tears. He forced himself to take another drag and threw up into a hedge.

They spent the rest of that afternoon together. Maybe he felt guilty for giving Quentin the cigarette, or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin’s company. Maybe he just needed a straight man. He led Quentin around the campus and lectured him on the underground lore of life at Brakebills.

“The keen-eyed incoming freshman will have noticed the weather, which is uncommonly clement for November. That’s because it’s still summer here. There are some very old spells on the Brakebills grounds to keep people from spotting it from the river or walking in by accident, that kind of thing. Fine old enchantments. Classic work of their kind. But they’re getting eccentric in their old age, and somewhere in the 1950s time started spinning off its axis here. Gets worse every year. Nothing to worry about, in the larger picture, but we’re a little behind the mainstream. Two months twenty-eight days, give or take a few hours.”

Quentin didn’t know whether to act as awestruck as he felt or try to produce an imitation of cool worldly ennui. He changed the subject and asked about the curriculum.

“You won’t have any choice about your schedule your first year. Henry”—Eliot only ever referred to Dean Fogg by his first name—“makes everybody do the same thing. Are you smart?”

There was no non-embarrassing answer to this.

“I guess.”

“Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.

“The work is different, too. It’s not what you think. You don’t just wave a wand and yell some made-up Latin. There’s reasons why most people can’t do it.”

“Which are what?” Quentin asked.

“The reasons why most people can’t do magic? Well.” Eliot held up a long, thin finger. “One, it’s very hard, and they’re not smart enough. Two, it’s very hard, and they’re not obsessive and miserable enough to do all the work you have to do to do it right. Three, they lack the guidance and mentorship provided by the dedicated and startlingly charismatic faculty of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. And four, they lack the tough, starchy moral fiber necessary to wield awesome magical energies calmly and responsibly.

“And five”—he stuck up his thumb—“some people have all that stuff and they still can’t do it. Nobody knows why. They say the words, wave their arms, and nothing happens. Poor bastards. But that’s not us. We’re the lucky ones. We have it, whatever it is.”

“I don’t know if I have the moral fiber one.”

“I don’t either. I think that one’s optional, actually.”

Silent for a while, they walked along a lush, ruler-straight allée of fence trees leading back toward the lawn. Eliot lit another cigarette.

“Listen, I don’t want to pry,” Quentin said, “but I’m assuming you have some secret magical way of dealing with the negative health effects of all those cigarettes.”

“It’s kind of you to ask. I sacrifice a virgin schoolgirl every other fortnight by the light of a gibbous moon, using a silver scalpel forged by Swiss albinos. Who are also virgins. Clears my little lungs right up.”

After that Quentin saw Eliot most days. Eliot spent one entire afternoon teaching him how to navigate the hedge maze that separated the House—“as everybody calls it”—from the great lawn, which was officially named Seagrave’s Lawn after the eighteenth-century Dean who cleared and leveled it, and which “everybody” referred to as the Sea, or sometimes the Grave. There were six fountains scattered throughout the maze (the Maze), and each one had an official name, usually that of a deceased Dean, as well as a nickname generated by the collective unconsciousness of generations of Brakebillian undergraduates. The hedges that made up the Maze were cut in the shape of heavy, slow-thighed beasts — bears and elephants and other less-easily-identifiable creatures. Unlike ordinary topiary they moved: they lumbered along very slowly, almost imperceptibly, wading half submerged in the dark foliage like hippopotami wallowing in an equatorial African river.

On the last day before classes began, Eliot led him around to the front of the House, which looked out on the Hudson. There was a scrim of plane trees between the front terrace and the river and a flight of wide stone steps that led down to a handsome Victorian boathouse. They decided on the spot that they absolutely had to go out on the water, even though neither of them had any practical ideas about how to do it. As Eliot pointed out, they were both certified sorcerer-geniuses, and how hard could it be to row a damn boat?

With a lot of grunting and yelling at each other, they wrestled a long wooden double scull down from the rafters. It was a fabulous object, strangely light, like the husk of a colossal stick insect, wreathed in cobwebs and redolent with the heady smell of wood varnish. Mostly by luck they managed to turn it over and splash it down into the water without injuring it or themselves or getting so pissed off at each other that they had to abandon the whole project. After some early close calls they got it pointed in a plausible direction and settled into a slow, halting rhythm with it, hindered but not daunted by their incompetence and by the fact that Quentin was hopelessly out of shape and Eliot was both out of shape and a heavy smoker.

They got about half a mile upstream before the summer day abruptly vanished around them and became chilly and gray. Quentin thought it was a summer squall until Eliot explained that they’d reached the outer limits of whatever concealment spells had been applied to the Brakebills grounds, and it was November again. They wasted twenty minutes rowing up past the change and then drifting back down again, up and back, watching the sky change color, feeling the temperature drop and then soar and then drop again.

They were too tired to row on the way back, so they drifted with the current. Eliot lay back in the scull and smoked and talked. Because of his air of infallible entitlement Quentin assumed he’d been raised among the wealthy mandarins of Manhattan, but it turned out he’d actually grown up on a farm in eastern Oregon.

“My parents are paid not to grow soybeans,” he said. “I have three older brothers. Magnificent physical specimens — kind-hearted, thick-necked, three-sport athletes who drink Schlitz and feel sorry for me. My dad doesn’t know what happened. He thinks he chewed too much dip before I was conceived, and that’s why I ‘di’n’t come out reg’lar.’ ” Eliot stubbed out his Merit in a glass ashtray balanced precariously on the glossy wooden hull and lit another one. “They think I’m at a special school for computer geeks and homosexuals.

“That’s why I don’t go home in the summertime. Henry doesn’t care. I haven’t been home since I started here.

“You probably feel sorry for me,” he went on airily. He wore a dressing gown over his regular clothes, which gave him a shabby princely look. “You shouldn’t, you know. I’m very happy here. Some people need their families to become who they’re supposed to be. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are other ways to do it.”

Quentin hadn’t realized how hard-won Eliot’s air of ludicrously exaggerated insouciance must be. That facade of lofty indifference must be there to hide real problems. Quentin liked to think of himself as a sort of regional champion of unhappiness, but he wondered if Eliot had him outclassed on that score, too.

As they drifted home they were passed by a few other boats, sailboats and cabin cruisers and a hard-charging eight-woman scull out of West Point, which was a few miles upriver. The occupants looked grim and bundled-up against the cold, in gray sweatshirts and sweatpants. They couldn’t perceive, or somehow weren’t part of, the August heat that Quentin and Eliot were enjoying. They were warm and dry and didn’t even know it. The terms of the enchantment locked them out.

MAGIC

“The study of magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.

“This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don’t understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has.

“With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”

Delivering this edifying lecture was Professor March, whom Quentin had last seen during his Examination — he was the round, red-haired man with the hungry lizard. Because he was plump and red-faced he looked like he should be jolly and easygoing, but in actuality he was turning out to be kind of a hard-ass.

When Quentin woke up that morning the huge empty House was full of people — yelling, running, noisy people who dragged trunks thunderously up stairs and occasionally banged open his door, looked him over, and then slammed it shut again. It was a rude awakening; he’d gotten used to wandering around the House by himself as its undisputed lord and master, or at least, after Eliot, its senior undersecretary. But as it turned out there were ninety-nine other students enrolled at Brakebills, divided into five classes that corresponded roughly to freshman through first-year graduate student. They had arrived this morning en masse for the first day of the semester, and they were asserting their rights.

They came in clumps, materializing ten at a time on the back terrace, each group with a hillock of trunks and duffle bags and suitcases beside it. Everybody except Quentin was in uniform: striped blazers and ties for the guys, white blouses and dark tartan skirts for the girls. For a college, it all looked a whole lot like a prep school.

“It’s jacket and tie at all times except in your room,” Fogg explained. “There are more rules; you’ll pick them up from the others. Most boys like to choose their own ties. I am inclined to be lenient on that score, but don’t test me. Anything too exciting will be confiscated, and you’ll be forced to wear the school tie, which I know very little about these things, but I am told is cruelly unfashionable.”

When Quentin got back to his room he found a closetful of identical jackets hanging there, dark blue and chocolate brown in inch-wide stripes, paired with white dress shirts. Most of them looked brand new; a few showed signs of incipient sheen at the elbows or fraying around the cuffs and smelled faintly but not unpleasantly of mothballs and tobacco and former occupants. He changed gingerly and looked at himself in the mirror. He knew that he was probably supposed to resent the uniform, but he relished it. If he didn’t feel like a magician yet, at least he could look like one.

Each jacket had an embroidered coat of arms on it, a golden bee and a golden key on a black background dotted with tiny silver stars. He would later hear other students call this device the key-and-bee, and once he started looking for it he saw it everywhere, worked into carpets and curtains, carved into stone lintels, pieced into the corners of parquet floors.

Now Quentin sat in a large square lecture hall, a corner room with high, lofty windows on two sides. It contained four rows of elegant wooden desks set on raked steps like an amphitheater, looking down on a large blackboard and a massive stone demonstration table that had been scorched, scratched, scarred, and scathed within an inch of its life. Particles of chalk dust hung in the air. The class had twenty students, all in uniform, all looking like very ordinary teenagers trying very hard to look cooler and smarter than each other. Quentin knew that probably half the Intel Science Talent Search winners and Scripps Spelling Bee champions in the country were in this room. Based on what he had overheard, one of his classmates had placed second in the Putnam Competition, as a high school junior. He knew for a fact that one of the girls had managed to take over the plenary session of the national model UN and push through a motion sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons to protect a critically endangered species of sea turtle. This while representing Lesotho.

Not that any of that stuff mattered anymore, but the air was still thick with nerves. Sitting there in his new-smelling shirt and jacket, Quentin already wished he were back on the river with Eliot.

Professor March paused, refocusing.

“Quentin Coldwater, would you please come up to the front of the class? Why don’t you do some of your magic for us?”

March was looking straight at him.

“That’s right.” His manner was warm and cheery, like he was giving Quentin a prize. “Right here.” He indicated a spot next to him. “Here. I’ll give you a prop.”

Professor March rummaged in his pockets and took out a clear glass marble, somewhat linty, and put it on the table, where it rolled a few inches before it found a hollow to settle in.

The classroom was absolutely still. Quentin knew this wasn’t a real test. It was some kind of object-lesson-slash-hazing ritual. An annual thing, probably nothing to worry about, just one more wonderful old Brakebills tradition. But his legs felt like wooden stilts as he made his way down the broad steps to the front of the class. The other students stared at him with the cold indifference of the gratefully spared.

He took his place next to March. The marble looked ordinary, just glass with a few air bubbles in it. About the same circumference as a nickel. Probably about as easy to palm, too, Quentin supposed. With his brand-new school jacket on he could cuff and sleeve it without too much trouble. All right, he thought, if it’s magic they want, magic they shall get. Blood thundering in his ears, he produced it from either hand, from his mouth, from his nose. He was rewarded with scattered giggles from the audience.

The tension broke. He hammed it up. He tossed the marble up in the air, letting it almost brush the high cathedral ceiling, then leaned forward and caught it neatly balanced in the hollow of the back of his neck. Somebody did a rim shot on his desk. The room broke up.

For his grand finale Quentin pretended to crush the marble with a heavy iron paperweight, at the last second substituting a mint Lifesaver he happened to have in his pocket, which made a nice solid crunch and left behind a forensically convincing spray of white powder. He apologized profusely to Professor March, winking broadly at the audience, then asked him if he could borrow his handkerchief. When he reached for the handkerchief, Professor March discovered the marble in his own jacket pocket.

Quentin executed a Johnny Carson golf swing. The First Years applauded wildly. He bowed. Not bad, he thought. Half an hour into his first semester and he was already a folk hero.

“Thank you, Quentin,” Professor March said unctuously, clapping with the tips of his fingers. “Thank you, that was very enlightening. You may return to your seat. Alice, what about you? Why don’t you show us some magic.”

This remark was addressed to a small, sullen girl with straight blonde hair who’d been huddling in the back row. She showed no surprise at being picked; she looked like the kind of person who expected the worst at all times, and why should today be any different? She walked down the wide steps of the lecture hall to the front of the room — eyes straight ahead, cold-bloodedly ascending the gallows, looking hideously uncomfortable in her freshly creased uniform — and mutely accepted her marble from Professor March. Taking her place behind the demonstration table, which came up to her chest, she steadied it on the stone tabletop.

Immediately she made a series of rapid, businesslike gestures over the marble. It looked like she was doing sign language, or assembling a cat’s cradle with invisible string. Her unfussy manner was the opposite of Quentin’s slick, show-offy style. Alice stared at the marble intently, expectantly. Her eyes went a little crossed. Her lips moved, though from where he was sitting Quentin couldn’t hear what she was saying.

The marble began to glow red, then white, becoming opaque, an eye clouding over with a milky cataract. A slender undulating curl of gray smoke rose up from the point where it touched the table. Quentin’s smug, triumphant feeling went cold and congealed. She already knew real magic, he thought. My God, I am so far behind.

Alice rubbed her hands together.

“It takes a minute for my fingers to become impervious.”

Cautiously, as if she were retrieving a hot dish from an oven, Alice plucked at the glass marble with her fingertips. It was now molten from the heat, and it pulled like taffy. In four quick, sure motions she gave the marble four legs, then added a head. When she took her hands away and blew on it the marble rolled over, shook itself once, and stood up. It had become a tiny, plump glass animal. It began to walk across the table.

This time no one applauded. The chill in the room was palpable. The hair stood up on Quentin’s arms. The only sound was the soft tik-tik-katikkatik of its pointy glass feet on the stone tabletop.

“Thank you, Alice!” Professor March said, regaining the stage. “For those of you who are wondering, Alice just performed three basic spells.” He held up a finger for each one. “Dempsey’s Silent Thermogenesis; a lesser Cavalieri animation; and some kind of ward-and-shield that appears to be home-brewed, so maybe we should name it after you, Alice.”

Alice looked back at March impassively, waiting for a cue that she could go back to her seat. She wasn’t even smug, just impatient to be released. Forgotten, the little glass creature reached the end of the table. Alice made a grab for it, but it fell and smashed on the hard stone floor. She crouched down over it, stricken, but Professor March was already moving on, wrapping up his lecture.

Quentin watched the little drama with a mixture of compassion and rivalrous envy. Such a tender soul, he thought. But she’s the one I’ll have to beat.

“Tonight please read the first chapter of Le Goff’s Magickal Historie, in the Lloyd translation,” March said, “and the first two chapters of Amelia Popper’s Practical Exercises for Young Magicians, a book that you will soon come to despise with every fiber of your innocent young beings. I invite you to attempt the first four exercises. Each of you will be performing one of them for the class tomorrow.

“And if you find Lady Popper’s rather quaint eighteenth-century English difficult, keep in mind that next month we will be starting Middle English, Latin, and Old High Dutch, at which time you will look back on Lady Popper’s eighteenth-century English with fond nostalgia.”

Students began stirring and gathering up their books. Quentin looked down at the notebook in front of him, which was empty except for one anxious zigzaggy line.

“Final thought before you go.” March raised his voice over the shuffling clatter. “I urge you again to think of this as a purely practical course, with a minimum of theory. If you find yourself becoming curious about the nature and origins of the magical powers you are slowly and very, very painfully cultivating, remember this famous anecdote about the English philosopher Bertrand Russell.

“Russell once gave a public lecture on the structure of the universe. Afterward he was approached by a woman who told him that he was a very clever young man but much mistaken in his thinking, because everyone knew that the world was flat and sat on the back of a turtle.

“When Russell asked her what the turtle was standing on, she replied, ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down!’

“The woman was wrong about the world, of course, but she would have been quite right if she’d been talking about magic. Great mages have wasted their lives trying to get at the root of magic. It is a futile pursuit, not much fun and occasionally quite hazardous. Because the farther down you go, the bigger and scalier the turtles get, with sharper and sharper beaks. Until eventually they start looking less like turtles and more like dragons.

“Everyone take a marble, please, as you go.”

The very next afternoon March taught them a simple chant to say over their marbles in a crooked gypsy-sounding language that Quentin didn’t recognize (later Alice told him it was Estonian), accompanied by a tricky gesture that involved moving the middle and pinky fingers on both hands independently, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Those who completed it successfully could leave early, the rest had to stay until they got it right. How would they know when they got it right? They would know.

Quentin stayed until his voice was hoarse and his fingers were on fire, until the light in the windows had softened and changed color and then sunk away completely, until his empty stomach ached, and dinner had been served and cleared away in the distant dining room. He stayed until his face was warm with shame, and all but four other people had stood up — some of them pumped their fists in the air and said yesssss!!! — and left the classroom. Alice had been the first, after about twenty minutes, though she left silently. Finally Quentin said the chant and made the motions — he didn’t even know what he did differently this time — and was rewarded by the sight of his marble wobbling, very slightly but unmistakably, of its own volition.

He didn’t say anything, just put his head down on his desk, hiding his face in the crook of his elbow, and let the blood in his head throb in the darkness. The wooden desk was cool on his cheek. It hadn’t been a fluke, or a hoax, or a joke. He had done it. Magic was real, and he could do it.

And now that he could, my God, there was so much of it to do. That glass marble would be Quentin’s constant companion for the rest of the semester. It was the cold, pitiless glass heart of Professor March’s approach to magical pedagogy. Every lecture, every exercise, every demonstration was concerned with how to manipulate and transform it using magic. For the next four months Quentin was required to carry his marble everywhere. He fingered his marble under the table at dinner. It nestled in the inside pockets of his Brakebills jacket. When he showered, he tucked it in the soap dish. He took it to bed with him, and on those rare occasions when he slept he dreamed about it.

Quentin learned to cool his marble until it frosted over. He caused it to roll around a table by invisible means. He learned to float his marble in midair. He made it glow from within. Because it was already transparent it was easy to render invisible, upon which he promptly lost it and Professor March had to rematerialize it for him. Quentin made his marble float in water, pass through a wooden barrier, fly through an obstacle course and attract iron filings like a magnet. This was nuts-and-bolts work, ground-level fundamentals. The dramatic spellcasting display Quentin had performed during his exam, however showy and satisfying, he was told, was a well-understood anomaly, a flare-up of accumulated power that often manifested during a sorcerer’s first casting. It would be years before he could do anything comparable again.

In the meantime Quentin also studied the history of magic, about which even magicians knew less than he would have thought. It turned out that magic-users had always lived within mainstream society, but apart from it and largely unknown to it. The towering figures of magical history weren’t famous at all in the mundane world, and the obvious guesses were way off base. Leonardo, Roger Bacon, Nostradamus, John Dee, Newton — sure, all of them were mages of various stripes, but of relatively modest ability. The fact that they were famous in mainstream circles was just a strike against them. By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

Quentin’s other homework, Popper’s Practical Exercises for Young Magicians, turned out to be a thin, large-format volume containing a series of hideously complex finger and voice exercises arranged in order of increasing difficulty and painfulness. Much of spellcasting, Quentin gathered, consisted of very precise hand gestures accompanied by incantations to be spoken or chanted or whispered or yelled or sung. Any slight error in the movement or in the incantation would weaken, or negate, or pervert the spell.

This wasn’t Fillory. In each of the Fillory novels one or two of the Chatwin children were always taken under the wing of a kindly Fillorian mentor who taught them a skill or a craft. In The World in the Walls Martin becomes a master horseman and Helen trains as a kind of forest scout; in The Flying Forest Rupert becomes a deadeye archer; in A Secret Sea Fiona trains with a master fencer; and so on. The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Learning magic was nothing like that. It turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be. The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory, too. Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.

But there was something else to it, too, something beyond all the practicing and memorizing, beyond the dotted i’s and crossed t’s, something that never came up in March’s lectures. Quentin only sensed it, without really being able to talk about it, but there was something else you needed if a spell was going to get any purchase on the world around you. Whenever he tried to think about it he got lost in abstractions. It was something like force of will, a certain intensity of concentration, a clear vision, maybe a dash of artistic brio. If a spell was going to work, then on some gut level you had to mean it.

He couldn’t explain it, but Quentin could tell when it was working. He could sense his words and gestures getting traction on the mysterious magical substrate of the universe. He could feel it physically. His fingertips got warm, and they seemed to leave trails in the air. There was a slight resistance, as if the air were getting viscous around him and pushing back against his hands and even against his lips and tongue. His mind buzzed with a caffeine-cocaine fizz. He was at the heart of a large and powerful system, he was its heart. When it was working, he knew it. And he liked it.

Now that his friends had come back from vacation Eliot sat with them at meals instead. They were a highly visible clique, always earnestly conferring with each other and having fits of obstreperous public laughter, conspicuously fond of themselves and uninterested in the greater Brakebills populace. There was something different about them, though it was hard to say what. They weren’t better-looking or smarter than anybody else. They just seemed to know who they were, and they weren’t constantly looking around at everybody else as if they could tell them.

It rankled the way Eliot had dropped Quentin the minute he ceased to be convenient, but then there were the nineteen other First Years to think of. Though they weren’t a wildly social bunch. They were quiet and intense, always eyeing each other assessingly, as if they were trying to figure out who — if it came right down to it — would take out who in an intellectual death match. They didn’t congregate overmuch — they were always civil but rarely warm. They were used to competing and used to winning. In other words, they were like Quentin, and Quentin wasn’t used to being around people like himself.

The one student he and every other First Year at Brakebills was immediately obsessed with was little Alice, of the tiny glass creature, but it quickly became apparent that in spite of being way ahead of the rest of her year academically she was cripplingly shy, to the point where there wasn’t much point in trying to talk to her. When approached at meals she answered questions in whispered monosyllables, her gaze dropping to the tablecloth in front of her as if weighed down by some infinite inner shame. She was almost pathologically unable to make eye contact, and she had a way of hiding her face behind her hair that made it clear how agonizing it was for her to be the object of human attention.

Quentin wondered who or what could possibly have convinced somebody with such obvious gifts that she should be frightened of other people. He wanted to keep up a proper head of competitive steam, but instead he felt almost protective of her. The one and only time he saw Alice look genuinely happy was when he watched her, alone and momentarily unself-conscious, successfully skip a pebble across the pool in a fountain and between the legs of a stone nymph.

Life at Brakebills had a hushed, formal, almost theatrical tone to it, and at mealtimes formality was elevated to the level of a fetish. Dinners were served promptly at six thirty; latecomers were denied the privilege of a chair and ate standing. Faculty and students sat together at one interminable table that was swathed in a tablecloth of mystical whiteness and laid with heavy-handled silverware that didn’t match. Illumination was provided by battalions of hideous candelabras. The food, contrary to private school tradition, was excellent in an old-fashioned, Frenchified way. Menus tended toward mid-century warhorses like boeuf en daube and lobster thermidor. First Years had the privilege of serving all the other students as waiters, under the stern direction of Chambers, and then eating by themselves when everybody else was done. Third and Fourth Years were allowed one glass of wine with dinner; Fifth Years (or “Finns,” as they were called, for no obvious reason) got two. Oddly enough there were only ten Fourth Years, half the usual number, and nobody would explain why. Asking about it just ended the conversation.

All this Quentin picked up with the speed of a sailor cast away on a savage foreign continent, who has no choice but to learn the local language as rapidly as possible or be devoured by those who speak it. His first two months at Brakebills spun by, and soon red and gold leaves were scattering across the Sea, as if they were being pushed by invisible brooms — which possibly they were? — and the flanks of the slow-moving topiary beasts in the Maze showed streaks of color.

Quentin devoted a half hour every day after class to exploring the campus on foot. One blustery afternoon he stumbled onto a pocket vineyard, a postage stamp of earth ruled into straight lines and planted with rows of grapevines strung up on rusty wires and trained into weird vinicultural candelabra shapes. By now the grapes had already been harvested, and those that hadn’t had shriveled on the vine into tiny fragrant raisins.

Beyond it, a quarter mile off into the woods, at the end of a narrow path, Quentin discovered a small field neatly divided into a patchwork of squares. Some of the squares were grass, some were stone, some were sand, some were water, and two were made of blackened, silvery metal, elaborately inscribed.

There was no fence or wall to mark the edge of the grounds, or if there was he never found it. There was just the river along one side and woods all around the rest. Even so the faculty seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time maintaining the spells that kept the school invisible and impregnable to outsiders. They were constantly strolling the perimeter, studying things Quentin couldn’t see, and pulling one another out of classes to consult about it.

SNOW

One afternoon in late October Professor March asked Quentin to stay behind after Practical Applications. P.A. — as everybody called it — was the part of the day when the students worked on actual spellcasting. They were allowed to attempt only the most basic magic at this stage, under smotheringly close supervision, but still. It was a small practical reward for all those oceans of theory they were navigating.

That particular class had not been a successful one for Quentin. P.A. was held in a room that resembled a college chemistry lab: indestructible gray stone tables; counters mottled with ancient unspeakable stains; deep, capacious sinks. The air was thickly charged with permanent charms and wards installed by generations of Brakebills professors to prevent students from injuring themselves or each other. It carried a whiff of ozone.

Quentin watched his lab partner Surendra dust his hands with a white powder (equal parts flour and beech-wood ash), draw certain invisible sigils in the air with a freshly trimmed willow wand, and then bring the wand softly down on his marble (nickname: Rakshasa!), slicing it neatly in half with one stroke, first try. But when Quentin brought the willow wand down on his marble (nickname: Martin) it burst with a quiet pop, like a dying lightbulb, throwing off a spray of glass chunks and powder. Quentin dropped the wand and spun away to shield his eyes; everybody else in the room craned their heads to look. The atmosphere in the P.A. room wasn’t particularly collegial.

So Quentin was already in a foul mood when Professor March asked him to stay behind after class. March chatted with stragglers in the hall while Quentin sat on one of the indestructible tables, swinging his legs and thinking black thoughts. He was somewhat reassured that Alice had been asked to stay behind, too. She sat by the window staring dreamily out at the sluggish Hudson. Her marble floated in slow circles around her head, a lazy miniature satellite, sometimes clicking against the glass when she leaned too close. Why did magic come to her so effortlessly? he wondered. Or was it as effortless as it looked? He couldn’t believe it was as hard for her as it was for him. Penny was there, too, looking pale and intense and moon-faced as always. He wore the Brakebills uniform, but they’d let him keep his mohawk.

Professor March came back in, followed by Professor Van der Weghe. She didn’t mince words.

“We asked you three to stay behind because we are considering advancing you to Second Year for the spring term,” she said. “You would have to do some extra work on your own in order to pass your First Year exams in December and then catch up to the Second Years, but I think you’re up to it. Am I right?”

She looked around encouragingly. She wasn’t really asking them so much as telling them. Quentin and Penny and Alice glanced at one another uneasily and looked away again. From long experience Quentin had learned not to be surprised when his intellectual abilities were rated over other people’s, and this mark of favor certainly wiped out the nightmare of his pulverized marble, with interest. But everybody was acting very solemn and serious about it. It sounded like a lot of work for the privilege of skipping a year at Brakebills, which he wasn’t even sure he wanted to do anyway.

“Why?” Penny spoke up. “Why move us up? Are you going to move other students down to make room for us?”

He had a point. It was an immutable fact of life at Brakebills that there were always twenty students per class, no more and no fewer.

“Different students learn at different speeds, Penny,” was all she said. “We want to keep everybody where they’re most comfortable.”

There were no further questions. After a suitable interval Professor Van der Weghe accepted their silence as consent.

“All right then,” she said. “Good luck to all of you.”

Those words plunged Quentin into a new and darker phase of his life at Brakebills, just when he’d gotten comfortable with the old one. Until then he’d worked hard, but he got in his share of malingering like everybody else. He wandered around campus and killed time with the other First Years in the First Years’ lounge, which was a shabby but cozy room with a fireplace and an assortment of critically injured couches and armchairs and embarrassingly lame “educational” board games, basically magical versions of Trivial Pursuit, all warped and stained and missing crucial pieces and cards and spinners. They even had a contraband video-game console set up in a closet, a three-year-old box hooked up to an even older TV. It fuzzed out and rebooted whenever anybody fired up a spell within two hundred yards of it, which was pretty much constantly.

That was before. Now there was no time when Quentin wasn’t studying. As often as Eliot had warned him about what he was in for, and as hard as he’d worked up till now, he still somehow imagined that learning magic would turn out to be a delightful journey through a secret garden where he would gaily pluck the heavy fruit of knowledge from conveniently low-hanging branches. Instead every afternoon after P.A. Quentin went straight to the library to rush through his regular homework so he could betake himself after dinner to the library, where his appointed tutor waited for him.

His tutor was Professor Sunderland, the pretty young woman who had asked him to draw maps during his Examination. She looked nothing like a magician was supposed to: she was blond and dimply and distractingly curvy. Professor Sunderland taught mostly upper-level courses, Fourth and Fifth Years, and didn’t have much patience for amateurs. She drilled him relentlessly on gestures and incantations and charts and tables, and when he was perfect, that was a start, but she’d like to see Popper etudes No. 7 and No. 13 again, please, slowly, forward and then backward, just to make sure. Her hands did things Quentin couldn’t imagine his hands ever doing. It would have been intolerable if Quentin didn’t have a ferocious crush on Professor Sunderland.

He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It’s not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.

Quentin spent a lot more of his time with Alice and Penny now. Brakebills had an eleven-o’clock lights-out policy for First Years, but with their extra workload the three of them had to find a way around it. Fortunately there was a small study off one of the student wings that, according to Brakebills lore, was exempt from whatever monitoring spells the faculty used to enforce curfew. Probably they left it like that deliberately as a loophole for situations like this. It was a leftover space — musty, windowless, and trapezoidal — but it had a couch and a table and chairs, and the faculty never checked it after hours, so that was where Quentin, Alice, and Penny went when the rest of the First Years went to bed.

They made an odd little tribe: Alice sitting hunched over the table; Quentin sprawled on the couch; Penny pacing in circles, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. The odious Popper books were hexed in such a way that you could practice in front of them and they would tell you if you’d screwed up or not by turning green (good) or red (bad), although annoyingly they wouldn’t tell you how you’d screwed up.

But Alice always knew how you screwed up. Of the three of them she was the prodigy, with preternaturally flexible hands and wrists and a freakish memory. When it came to languages she was omnivorous and insatiable. While her classmates were still wallowing in the shallows of Middle English, she was already plunging into Arabic and Aramaic and Old High Dutch and Old Church Slavonic. She was still painfully shy, but the late nights she spent with Quentin and Penny in the after-hours room wore away some of her reserve, to the point where she would sometimes exchange notes and pointers with the other two. Once in a while she even revealed a sense of humor, though more often than not she made her jokes in Old Church Slavonic.

They probably would have been lost on Penny anyway. He had no sense of humor at all. He practiced by himself, murmuring and watching his pale hands sign and flutter in a massive baroque gilt-framed mirror leaned up against the wall. The mirror had an old, fading, forgotten enchantment on it, so Penny’s reflection was sometimes replaced with an image of a treeless green hillside, a smooth grassy curve under an overcast sky. It was like a TV with a poorly installed cable box, picking up a stray image from far away, some other world.

Rather than take a break, Penny would just wait silently and impassively for the image to change back. Secretly the mirror made Quentin nervous, as if something horrible were about to come strolling over the top of that hill, or was buried restlessly underneath it.

“I wonder where it is,” Alice said. “In real life.”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “Maybe it’s in Fillory.”

“You could climb through. That’s always how it works in the books.”

“How great would that be? Think about it: we could go through and study for a month and come back and ace this thing.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to go to Fillory so you can get more homework done,” Alice said. “Because that would be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“A little quiet, people,” Penny said.

For a punk Penny could be an unbelievable drag.

Winter descended, a deep, bitter-cold Hudson Valley winter. The fountains froze over, and the Maze was traced in white snow, except where the topiary animals shivered and humped up and shook it off. Quentin and Alice and Penny found themselves drawing apart from their classmates, who regarded them with envy and resentment that Quentin didn’t have the time or energy to deal with. For the time being they were their own exclusive club within the already closed club of Brakebills.

Quentin was rediscovering his love of work. It wasn’t really a thirst for knowledge that kept him going, or any desire to live up to Professor Van der Weghe’s belief that he belonged in Second Year. It was mostly just the familiar, perverse satisfaction of repetitive, backbreaking labor, the same masochistic pleasure that had enabled him to master the Mills Mess pattern and the faro shuffle and the Charlier cut and to lay waste to Calculus 2 when he was still in eighth grade.

A few of the older students took pity on the three marathon crammers. They adopted them as mascots the way a class of kindergartners would adopt a family of gerbils. They egged them on and brought them snacks and sodas after hours. Even Eliot condescended to visit, bringing with him a set of illegal charms and talismans for staying awake and reading faster, though it was hard to tell whether they worked or not. They were procured, he said, from a seedy itinerant salesman who turned up at Brakebills once or twice a year in an old wood-paneled station wagon crammed with junk.

December slid by on silent runners, in a sleepless dream of constant toil. The work had lost all connection to whatever goal it was supposed to be accomplishing. Even Quentin’s sessions with Professor Sunderland lost their spark. He caught himself staring bleakly at the radiant upper slopes of her achingly full and gropable breasts when he knew he should be devoting himself to far more pressing technical issues like correct thumb position. His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

Now he floated through Professor March’s lectures from the back row, feeling lofty contempt for his classmates, who were only on Popper etude No. 27, when he had already scaled the glorious heights of No. 51 and watched it grow tiny beneath his still-climbing feet. He began to hate the the grungy misshapen room where he and Penny and Alice did their late-night cramming. He hated the bitter, burned smell of the coffee they drank, to the point where he almost felt tempted to try the low-grade speed Penny took as an alternative. He recognized the irritable, unpleasant, unhappy person he was becoming: he looked strangely like the Quentin he thought he’d left behind in Brooklyn.

Quentin didn’t do all his studying in the trapezoidal spare room. On weekends he could work wherever he wanted, at least during the daytime. Mostly he stayed in his own room, but sometimes he climbed the long spiral staircase up to the Brakebills observatory, a respectable if antiquated facility at the top of one of the towers. It contained a massive late-nineteenth-century telescope the size of a telephone pole, poking up at an angle through a tarnished copper dome. Somebody on the staff must have been deeply in love with this obsolete instrument, because it floated on an exquisitely complicated array of brass gears and joints that was kept freshly oiled and in a state of high polish.

Quentin liked to read in the observatory because it was high up and well heated and relatively unfrequented: not only was it hard to get to, the telescope was useless during the day. This was usually enough to secure him an afternoon of lofty, wintry solitude. But on one Saturday in late November he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who’d figured this out. When Quentin reached the top of the spiral staircase, the trapdoor was already open. He poked his head up into the circular, amber-lit room.

It was like he’d poked his head into another world, an alien planet that looked eerily like his own, but rearranged. The interloper was Eliot. He was kneeling like a supplicant in front of an old orange armchair with ripped upholstery that stood in the middle of the room, in the center of the circular track that the telescope ran on. Quentin always wondered who had gotten the chair up there in the first place and why they’d bothered — magic was obviously involved, since it wouldn’t have fit through the trapdoor, or even any of the tiny windows.

Eliot wasn’t alone. There was somebody sitting in the chair. The angle was bad, but he thought it was one of the Second Years, an unexceptional, smooth-cheeked kid with straight rust-colored hair. Quentin barely knew him. His name might have been Eric.

“No,” Eric said, and then again sharply: “No! Absolutely not.” He was smiling. Eliot started to stand up, but the boy held him down playfully by his shoulders. He wasn’t especially large. The authority he exercised over Eliot wasn’t physical.

“You know the rules,” he said, like he was speaking to a child.

“Please? Just this once?” Quentin had never heard Eliot speak in that pleading, wheedling infantile tone before. “Please?” It was not a tone he had ever expected to hear Eliot speak in.

“Absolutely not!” Eric touched the tip of Eliot’s long, pale nose with his finger. “Not until you finish all your chores. Every single one. And take off that stupid shirt, it’s pathetic.”

Quentin got that it was a game they’d played before. He was watching a very private ritual.

“All right,” Eliot said petulantly. “And there is nothing wrong with this shirt,” he muttered.

Eric cut him off with a look. Then he spat, once, a white fleck on Eliot’s pristine shirtfront. Quentin saw the fear behind Eric’s eyes as he wondered if he’d gone too far. From this angle the armchair might have blocked Quentin’s view, but it didn’t quite as Eliot fumbled jinglingly with Eric’s belt buckle, then his fly, then jerked down his pants, exposing his thin, pale thighs.

“Careful,” Eric warned. There wasn’t much affection in his playacting, if that’s what it was. “Little bitch. You know the rules.”

Quentin couldn’t have said why he waited an extra minute before he ducked back down the ladder, back into his staid, predictable home universe, but he couldn’t stop watching. He was looking directly at the exposed wiring of Eliot’s emotional machinery. How could he not have known about this? He wondered if it was an annual thing, maybe Eliot went through a boy or two a year, anointing them and then discarding them when they no longer did the trick. Did he really have to hide like this? Even at Brakebills? On some level Quentin was hurt: If this was what Eliot wanted, why hadn’t he come after Quentin? Though as much as he longed for Eliot’s attention, he didn’t know if he could have gone through with it. It was better this way. Eliot wouldn’t have forgiven him for refusing.

The desperate hunger with which Eliot regarded the object on which he would perform his chores was unlike anything Quentin had ever seen. He was right in Eliot’s line of sight, but he never once glanced over at him.

Quentin decided he would do his reading elsewhere.

He finished Lady Amelia Popper’s Practical Exercises for Young Magicians, Vol. 1, at midnight the night before the exam, a Sunday. He carefully closed the book and sat for a minute staring at the cover. His hands shook. His head felt spinny and weightless. His body was unnaturally heavy. He couldn’t stay where he was, but he was too wired to go to bed either. He heaved himself up from the broken-backed couch and announced that he was going for a walk.

To his surprise Alice offered to come with him. Penny just stared at the green, overcast landscape in the mirror, waiting for his pale, stoic face to reappear so he could keep practicing. He didn’t look up as they left.

Quentin’s idea had been to walk out through the Maze and across the snowbound Sea to its outer edge, where he had first arrived, and look back at the hushed hulk of the House and think about why this was turning out to be so much less fun than it should have been and try to calm down enough to go to sleep. He supposed he could do that equally well with Alice as he could alone. He headed for the tall French doors that opened onto the back terrace.

“Not that way,” Alice said.

After hours the French doors were set to trigger a magical alert in the bedroom of whatever faculty member was on call, Infallible Alice explained, to discourage students from breaking curfew. She led him around to a side door he’d never seen before, unalarmed and concealed behind a tapestry, that opened out into a snow-covered hedge. They squeezed themselves through it and into the freezing darkness.

Quentin was easily eight inches taller than Alice, most of it in his legs, but she kept pace with him doggedly. They navigated the Maze together in the moonlight and set out across the frozen Sea. The snow was half a foot deep, and they kicked little spills of it ahead of them as they walked.

“I come out here every night,” Alice said, breaking the silence.

In his sleep-deprived state Quentin had almost forgotten she was there.

“Every night?” he said stupidly. “You do? Why?”

“Just… you know.” She sighed. Her breath puffed out white in the moonlight. “To clear my head. It gets noisy in the girls’ tower. You can’t think. It’s quiet out here.”

It was strange how normal it felt to be alone with the usually antisocial Alice. “It’s cold out here. You think they know you break curfew?”

“Of course. Fogg does, anyway.”

“So if he knows, why bother—”

“Why bother taking the side door?” The Sea was like a smooth clean sheet laid out around them, tucked in at the corners. Except for a few deer and wild turkeys, nobody else had been across it since the last snowfall. “I don’t think he really cares that much if we sneak out. But he appreciates it if you make an effort.”

They reached the edge of the great lawn and turned and looked back toward the House. One light was on, a teacher’s bedroom on a lower floor. An owl called. A hazy moon bleached the clouds white above the blocky outline of the roof. The scene was like an unshaken snow globe.

Quentin flashed on a memory from the Fillory books: the part in The World in the Walls when Martin and Fiona go wandering through the frozen woods looking for the trees the Watcherwoman has enchanted, each of which has a round ticking clock embedded in its trunk. As villains went the Watcherwoman was an odd specimen, since she rarely did anything particularly evil, or at any rate not where anybody could see her do it. She was usually glimpsed from a distance, rushing around with a book in one hand and an elaborate timepiece in the other; sometimes she drove a terrifyingly elaborate ormolu clock-carriage that ticked loudly as it raced along. She always wore a veil that covered her face. Wherever she passed she planted her signature clock-trees.

Quentin caught himself listening for ticking, but there was no sound except for an occasional frozen crack from deep in the forest, its origin unguessable.

“This is where I came through the first time,” he said. “In the summer. I didn’t even know what Brakebills was. I thought I was in Fillory.”

Alice laughed: a surprising, hilarious shout. Quentin hadn’t actually meant it to be quite that funny.

“Sorry,” she said. “God, I used to love those books when I was little.”

“So where did you come through?”

“Over there.” She pointed at an another, identical stretch of trees. “But I didn’t come through like you. I mean, through a portal.”

They must have had some special, extra-magical form of conveyance for Infallible Alice, he thought. It was hard not to envy her. A phantom toll-booth, or a chariot of fire, probably. Drawn by thestrals.

“When I came, I walked here? I wasn’t Invited?” She was talking in questions, with exaggerated casualness, but her voice was suddenly wobbly. “I had a brother who went here. I always wanted to come, too, but they never Invited me. After a while I was getting too old, so I ran away. I’d been waiting and waiting for an Invitation and it never came. I knew I’d already missed the first year. I’m a year older than you, you know.”

He hadn’t known. She looked younger.

“So I took a bus from Urbana to Poughkeepsie, then taxis from there, as far as I could. Did you ever notice there’s no driveway here? No roads either. The nearest one is the state highway.” This was the longest speech Quentin had ever heard Alice make. “I had them let me off on the shoulder, in the middle of nowhere. I had to walk the last five miles. I got lost. Slept in the woods.”

“You slept in the woods? Like on the ground?”

“I know, I should have brought a tent. Or something. I don’t know what I was thinking, I was just hysterical.”

“What about your brother? He couldn’t let you in?”

“He died.”

She offered this neutrally, purely informationally, but it brought Quentin up short. He had never imagined that Alice could have a sibling, let alone a dead one. Or that she led anything other than a charmed life.

“Alice,” he said, “this doesn’t make any sense. You do realize you’re the smartest person in our class?”

She shrugged off the compliment with one shoulder, staring fiercely up at the House.

“So you just walked in? What did they do?”

“They couldn’t believe it. Nobody’s supposed to be able to find the House by themselves. They thought it was just an accident, but it’s so obvious there’s old magic here, tons of it. This whole place is wild with it — if you look at it through the right spells, it lights up like a forest fire.

“They must have thought I was a homeless person. I had twigs in my hair. I’d been crying all night. Professor Van der Weghe felt sorry for me. She gave me coffee and let me take the entrance Exam all by myself. Fogg didn’t want to let me, but she made him.”

“And you passed.”

She shrugged again.

“I still don’t get it,” Quentin said. “Why didn’t you get Invited like the rest of us?”

She didn’t answer, just stared up angrily at the hazy moon. There were tears on her cheeks. He realized that he had just casually put into words what was probably the overwhelming question of Alice’s entire existence at Brakebills. It occurred to him, long after it should have, that he wasn’t the only person here who had problems and felt like an outsider. Alice wasn’t just the competition, someone whose only purpose in life was to succeed and by doing so subtract from his happiness. She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was.

They were standing in the shadow of an enormous fir tree, a shaggy blue-gray monster groaning with snow. It made Quentin think of Christmas, and he suddenly realized that they’d missed it. He’d forgotten they were on Brakebills time. Real Christmas, in the rest of the world, had been two months ago, and he hadn’t even noticed. His parents had said something about it on the phone, but the dime hadn’t dropped. Funny how things like that stopped mattering. He wondered what James and Julia had done for vacation. They’d talked about all of them going up to Lake Placid together. Her parents had a cabin there.

And what did matter? It was starting to snow again, fine particles settling on his eyelashes. What the hell was out there that was worth all this work? What were they doing it for? Power, he supposed, or knowledge. But it was all so ridiculously abstract. The answer should have been obvious. He just couldn’t quite name it.

Next to him Alice shuddered from the cold. She hugged herself.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here now, however you got here,” Quentin said awkwardly. “We all are.” He put an arm around her hunched shoulders. If she didn’t lean into him, or in any way admit to being comforted, she didn’t have a seizure either, which he was half afraid she would. “Come on, let’s get back before Fogg really does get pissed. And we’ve got an exam tomorrow. You don’t want to be too tired to enjoy it.”

They took the test the next morning, on the Monday of the third week in December. It was two hours of essays and two hours of practical exercises. There wasn’t much actual spellcasting. Mostly Quentin sat in a bare classroom while three examiners, two from Brakebills and one external (she had a German accent, or maybe Swiss), listened to him recite Middle English incantations and identify spell forms and watched him try to make perfect circles of different sizes in the empty air, in different directions, with different fingers, while still more powdery snow sifted soundlessly down from the white sky outside. It was almost anticlimactic.

The results were slipped under each of their doors early the following morning, on a piece of thick cream paper that looked like a wedding invitation, folded over once. Quentin had passed, Alice had passed, and Penny had failed.

THE MISSING BOY

Brakebills let out for the last two weeks of December. At first Quentin wasn’t sure why he was so terrified of going home until he realized that it wasn’t home he was worried about per se. He was worried that if he left Brakebills they’d never let him back in. He would never find his way back again — they would close the secret door to the garden behind him, and lock it, and its outline would be lost forever among the vines and the stonework, and he would be trapped out in the real world forever.

In the end he went home for five days. And for a moment, as he was climbing the front stairs, and the good old familiar home smell descended on him, a lethal enchantment compounded of cooking and paint and Oriental rugs and dust, when he saw his mother’s toothy, exasperated smile and his dad’s hale, stubbly good humor, he became the person that he used to be around them again, and he felt the gravitational pull of the little kid he once was and in some unswept back corner of his soul always would be. He gave in to the old illusion that he’d been wrong to leave, that this was the life he should be living.

But the spell didn’t hold. He couldn’t stay. Something about his parents’ house was unbearable to him now. After his little curved tower-top room, how could he go back to his dingy old bedroom in Brooklyn with its crumbly white paint and its iron bars on the window and its view of a tiny walled-in dirt patch? He had nothing to say to his well-meaning, politely curious parents. Both their attention and their neglect were equally intolerable. His world had become complicated and interesting and magical. Theirs was mundane and domestic. They didn’t understand that the world they could see wasn’t the one that mattered, and they never would.

He came home on a Thursday. On Friday he texted James, and on Saturday morning he met up with James and Julia at an abandoned boat launch on the Gowanus. It was hard to say why they liked this place, except that it was roughly equidistant from their homes and fairly secluded — it was at the end of a dead-end street that butted up against the canal, and you had to climb over a corrugated-metal barrier to get to it. It had the quiet stillness of any place that was close to open water, however stagnant and poisonous that water might be. There was a kind of concrete barricade you could sit on while you troubled the viscous surface of the Gowanus with handfuls of stray gravel. A burnt-out brick warehouse with arched windows loomed over the scene from the opposite bank. Somebody’s future luxury condo.

It was good to see James and Julia again, but it was even better to see himself seeing them, and to see how much he had changed. Brakebills had rescued him. He was no longer the shoe-gazing fuck-up he’d been the day he left, James’s sidekick and Julia’s inconvenient suitor. When he and James exchanged their gruff hellos and cursory handshake-hugs, he didn’t feel that instinctive deference he used to feel around James, as if he were the hero of the piece and not Quentin. When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn’t gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over — just the shrapnel they couldn’t remove.

It hadn’t occurred to Quentin that they might not be completely glad to see him. He knew he’d left abruptly, without explanation, but he had no idea how hurt and betrayed they would feel. They all sat together, three in a row, looking out at the water, as Quentin extemporized a breezy account of the obscure but still highly selective educational institution that he was for some reason attending. He kept the curriculum as vague as possible. He focused on architectural details. James and Julia huddled together stiffly against the March chill (it was March now in Brooklyn) like an elderly married couple on a park bench. When it was his turn, James rattled on about senior projects, the prom, teachers Quentin hadn’t thought about once in six months — it was incredible that all this stuff was still going on, and that James still cared about it, and that he couldn’t see how everything had changed. Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.

And Julia — something had happened to his delicate, freckly Julia while he was away. Was it just that he didn’t love her anymore? Was he seeing her clearly for the first time? But no, her hair was longer now, and it was flat and lank — she had done something to tamp down the waviness — and there were dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Before she only ever smoked at parties, but now she lit cigarette after cigarette, one off the other, feeding each one down the end of a hollow steel fencepost when she was done. Even James seemed unnerved by her, tense and protective. She observed them both coolly, her black skirt blowing around her bare knees. Afterward he couldn’t have said for sure whether she’d even spoken at all.

That night, already jonesing for a taste of the magical world he’d just left, Quentin rifled through his old paperbacks for a Fillory novel and stayed up till three in the morning rereading The Flying Forest, one of the more incidental, less satisfying installments in the series, which featured Rupert, the goofy, feckless Chatwin brother. He and pretty, princessy Fiona find their way into Fillory via the upper branches of Rupert’s favorite climbing tree and spend the novel searching for the source of a ticking sound that’s keeping their friend Sir Hotspots (he’s a leopard, with exceptionally sharp ears) from sleeping.

The culprits turn out to be a tribe of dwarves who have hollowed out an entire mountain of copper-bearing rock and fashioned it into an immense timekeeping device (Quentin had never noticed before how obsessed Plover was with clockwork). In the end Rupert and Fiona enlist a friendly giant to simply bury the clock deeper with his enormous mattock, muffling its monstrous ticking noise, thereby mollifying both Sir Hotspots and the dwarves, who, as cave dwellers, liked being buried. Then they repair to the royal residence, Castle Whitespire, an elegant keep cunningly constructed as a giant clockwork mechanism. Wound by windmills, a great brass main-spring beneath the castle moved and rotated its towers in a slow, stately dance.

Now that he had been to Brakebills and knew something about real magic he could read Plover with a more critical eye. He wanted to know the technical details behind the spells. And why were the dwarves building that giant clock in the first place? And the denouement didn’t strike him as especially final — it reminded him too much of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Nothing stays buried forever. And where was the flying forest in The Flying Forest? Where were Ember and Umber, the stately twin rams who patrolled Fillory and kept order there? Though they rarely showed up till after the Chatwins had already taken care of things for them. Their real function seemed to be to make sure the Chatwins didn’t overstay their welcome — it was Ember and Umber who regularly evicted them and sent them back to England at the end of each book. It was Quentin’s least favorite thing about the series. Why couldn’t they just let them stay? Would that have been so bad?

It was obvious that Christopher Plover didn’t know anything about real magic. He wasn’t even really English: according to the flap copy he was an American who’d made a quick fortune in dry goods in the 1920s and moved to Cornwall just ahead of the stock market crash. A confirmed bachelor, as the saying goes, he embraced Anglophilia, began pronouncing his name the English way (“Pluvver”), and set himself up as a country squire in a vast home crammed with staff. (Only an American Anglophile could have created a world as definitively English, more English than England, as Fillory.) Legend had it that there actually was a family of Chatwin children, who lived next door to him. Plover always claimed that the Chatwin children would come over and tell him stories about Fillory, and that he just wrote them down.

But the real mystery of The Flying Forest, endlessly analyzed by zealous fans and slumming academics, lay in the final few pages. With the ticking problem taken care of, Rupert and Fiona are settling down to a celebratory feast with Sir Hotspots and his family — including an appealingly slinky leopard bride and any number of adorable fuzzy leopard kittens — when who should turn up but Martin, the eldest Chatwin child, who first discovered Fillory two books ago in The World in the Walls.

Martin is thirteen years old by now, a pubescent teenager, almost too old to be adventuring in Fillory. In earlier books he was a changeful character, whose moods swung from cheerful to black without warning. In The Flying Forest he’s in his depressive phase. It’s not long before he picks a fight with the younger, more dependably sunny Rupert. Some very English yelling and wrestling ensues. The Hotspots clan observes the proceedings with amused leopardly coolth. Breaking away, his shirt untucked and missing a button, Martin shouts at his siblings that it was he who had discovered Fillory, and it was he and not they who should have gotten to go on the adventure. And it wasn’t fair: Why did they always have to go home afterward? He was a hero in Fillory and nothing at home. Fiona icily tells him not to behave like a child. Martin stalks away into the dense Darkling Woods, weeping wimpy English schoolboy tears.

And then… he never returns. Fillory swallows him whole. Martin is absent from the next two books—A Secret Sea and the last book in the series, The Wandering Dune—and although his siblings hunt for him diligently, they never find him again. (Now it made Quentin think of poor Alice’s brother.) Like most fans Quentin assumed that Plover meant to bring Martin back in the last book of the series, restored and repentant, but Plover died unexpectedly in his fifties while The Wandering Dune was still in manuscript, and nothing in his papers ever suggested an answer to the riddle. It was an insoluble literary mystery, like Dickens’s unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Martin would always remain the boy who vanished into Fillory and never came back.

Quentin thought the answer might have been in the book he’d possessed so briefly, The Magicians, but it was long gone. He’d turned the House inside out and interrogated everybody in it, and by this point he’d given up. Someone at Brakebills must have taken it or tidied it up or lost it. But who, and why? Maybe it hadn’t even been real.

Quentin woke up early that Sunday morning already in fully fledged flight mode. He was spinning his wheels here. He had his new life to get on with. Feeling only the barest required minimum of guilt, he improvised an elaborate fictional confection for his parents — rich roommate, ski chalet in New Hampshire, I know it’s last minute but could he please? More lies, but what could you do, that was how you rolled when you were a secret teenage magician. He packed hurriedly — he’d left most of his clothes at school anyway — and half an hour later he was out on the streets of Brooklyn. He went straight to the old community garden. He walked into the thickest part of it.

He ended up at the back fence, looking through it at the rusting play set in a neighbor’s yard. Could it really be this small? He remembered the garden as practically a forest, but now it looked thin and scraggly. For several minutes he tramped around through the rubble and broken weeds and pumpkin corpses frozen in the act of rotting, back and forth, feeling more and more nervous and embarrassed. What did he do last time? Did he need the book? He must be missing something, but he couldn’t think what. The magic wasn’t happening. He tried to retrace his steps exactly. Maybe it was the wrong time of day.

Quentin went to get a slice of pizza and take stock, praying that nobody he knew would walk by and see him there when he was supposed to be on his way to Mount Alibi in New Hampshire. He didn’t know what to do. The trick wasn’t working. It was all falling away from him. He sat there in a booth with his bags next to him staring at his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors — why do all pizzerias have mirrored walls? — and reading the police blotter in the Park Slope free weekly. The walls reflected each other, mirrors on mirrors, an infinite curving gallery. And as he sat there, the long, narrow, busy room became still around him, almost without his knowing it. The mirrors became dark, the light changed, the bare tile became a polished parquet floor, and when he looked up from the paper again he was eating his slice alone in the junior common room at Brakebills.

Abruptly, with no fuss or ceremony, Alice and Quentin were Second Years. Classes met in a semicircular room in a back corner of the House. It was sunny but terrifyingly cold, and the insides of the tall, paneled windows were permanently iced over. In the mornings they were taught by Professor Petitpoids, an ancient and slightly dotty Haitian woman who wore a pointy black hat and made them address her as “Witch” instead of “Professor.” Half the time when someone asked her a question, she would just say, “An it harm none, do what you will.” But when it came to the practical requirements of working magic, her knobby walnut fingers were even more technically proficient than Professor Sunderland’s. In the afternoons, for P.A., they had Professor Heckler, a long-haired, blue-jawed German who was almost seven feet tall.

There was no particular rush to embrace the two newcomers. The promotion had effectively turned Quentin and Alice into a class of two: the First Years resented them and the Second Years ignored them. Alice wasn’t the star of the show anymore, the Second Years had stars of their own, principally a loud, bluff, broad-shouldered girl with straight dishwater hair named Amanda Orloff who was regularly called on to demonstrate techniques for the class. The daughter of a five-star Army general, she did magic in a gruff, unshowy, devastatingly competent way with her big, blocky hands, as if she were solving an invisible Rubik’s cube. Her thick fingers wrung the magic out of the air by main force.

The other students all assumed Quentin and Alice were friends already, and probably a couple, which in a funny way had the effect of calling into being a bond between them that hadn’t really had time to form yet. They were more comfortable with each other since she’d told him the painful secret of her arrival at Brakebills. She seemed to have been liberated by her late-night confession: she didn’t seem so fragile all the time — she didn’t always speak in that tiny, whispery voice, and he could make fun of her, and with some prompting he could get her to make fun of him, too. He wasn’t sure they were friends, exactly, but she was unfolding a little. He felt like a safecracker who — partly by luck — had sussed out the first digit in a lengthy, arduous combination.

One Sunday afternoon, tired of being shunned, Quentin went and found his old lab partner Surendra and dragged him out of the House for a walk. They wound their way out through the Maze in their overcoats, headed nowhere in particular, neither of them very enthusiastically. The sun was out, but it was still painfully cold. The hedges were heavy with melting ice, and snow was still piled up in the shadowy corners. Surendra was the son of an immensely wealthy Bengali-American computer executive from San Diego. His round, beatific face belied the fact that he was the most brutally sarcastic person Quentin had ever met.

Somehow on their way out to the Sea a Second Year girl named Gretchen attached herself to them. Blond and long-legged and slender, she was built like a prima ballerina except for the fact that she had a severe, clunking limp — something congenital having to do with a knee ligament — and walked with a cane.

“Tally ho, boys.”

“It’s the gimp,” Quentin said.

She wasn’t embarrassed about her leg. She told anybody who would listen that that’s where her power came from, and if she had it surgically corrected she wouldn’t be able to do magic anymore. Nobody knew if it was true or not.

They walked together as far as the edge of the grass, the three of them, then stopped. Maybe this had been a mistake, Quentin thought. None of them seemed to know which way to go, or what they were doing there. Gretchen and Surendra barely knew each other anyway. For a few minutes they talked about nothing — gossip, exams, teachers — but Surendra didn’t get any of the Second Year references, and every time he missed one his sulk deepened. The afternoon wobbled on its axis. Quentin picked up a wet stone and threw it as far as he could. It bounced silently on the grass. The wet made his ungloved hand even colder.

“Walk this way!” Gretchen said finally, and struck off across the Sea at an angle with her weird, rolling gait, which despite its awkwardness covered a lot of ground. Quentin wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh or not. They walked down a narrow gravel path, through a thin scrim of leafless poplar trees, and into a small clearing on the very outer fringe of the grounds.

Quentin had been here before. He was looking at a curious Alice-in-Wonderland playing field laid out in squares, with a broad margin of lawn around it. The squares were about a yard on a side, like a giant chessboard, though the grid was longer than it was wide, and the squares were different materials: water, stone, sand, grass, and two squares made of silvery metal.

The grass squares were neatly trimmed, like a putting green. The water squares were dark, glistening pools reflecting the windblown blue sky overhead.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what is it,” Surendra said.

“Do you want to play?” Gretchen walked around to the other side of the checkerboard, skirting the field. A tall white-painted wooden chair stood at midfield, like a lifeguard’s chair, or a judge’s chair at a tennis match.

“So this is a game?”

Surendra slit his eyes at him.

“Sometimes I really don’t get you,” he said. It was dawning on him that he knew something Quentin didn’t. Gretchen gave Surendra a conspiratorial look of shared pity. She was one of those people who assumed an attitude of instant intimacy with people she barely knew.

“This,” she said grandly, “is welters!”

Quentin was pretty much resigned to death by scorn. “So it’s a game.”

“Oh, it’s so much more than a game,” Gretchen said.

“It’s a passion,” Surendra said.

“It’s a lifestyle.”

“It’s a state of mind.”

“I can explain it to you, if you have about ten years.” Gretchen blew into her hands. “Basically one team stands at one end and one team stands at the other end and you try to capture squares.”

“How do you capture a square?”

Gretchen waggled her fingers in the air mysteriously. “With maaaaagic! ”

“Where’s the broomsticks?” Quentin was only half joking.

“No broomsticks. Welters is more like chess. They invented it about fifty million years ago. I think it was originally supposed to be a teaching aid. And some people say it was an alternative to dueling. Students kept killing each other, so they got them playing welters instead.”

“Those were the days.”

Surendra tried a standing long jump over a water square, but he slipped as he took off, shorted it, and caught one heel in the water.

“Shit!” He looked up at the freezing blue sky. “I hate welters!”

A crow took flight from the top of a winter elm. The sun was subsiding behind the trees in a frozen swirl of pink cirrus.

Surendra walked off the board, swinging his arms.

“I can’t feel my fingers. Let’s go in.”

They walked back down the path in the direction of the Sea, not talking, just blowing on their hands and rubbing them together. It was getting even colder as the sun went down. The trees were already black against the sky. They would have to hurry to change for dinner. A powerful feeling of late-afternoon futility was descending on Quentin. A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.

As they crossed the lawn Quentin found himself being quizzed about Eliot.

“So are you really friends with that guy?” Surendra said.

“Yeah, how do you even know him?”

“I don’t really. He mostly hangs out with his own crowd.” Quentin was secretly proud to be connected with Eliot, even if in reality they hardly spoke to each other anymore.

“Yeah, I know,” Surendra said. “The Physical Kids. What a bunch of losers.”

“What do you mean, Physical Kids?”

“You know, that whole clique. Janet Way and the fat one, Josh Hoberman — those guys. They all do physical magic for their Disciplines.”

In the Maze their white breath streamed up against the darkness of the box hedges. Surendra explained that starting with the Third Year students chose a specific magical topic to specialize in, or, more exactly, had it chosen for them by the faculty. Then students were divided into groups based on their specialties.

“It doesn’t matter that much, except that Disciplines map loosely to social groups — people tend to hang out mostly with their own kind. Physical’s supposed to be the rarest. They’re a little snobby about it, I guess. And anyway Eliot, you know about him.”

Gretchen raised her eyebrows and leered. His nose was red from having been out in the cold. By now they had reached the terrace, and the pink sunset was smeared anamorphically all over the wavy glass in the French doors.

“No, I don’t think I do know,” Quentin said stiffly. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“You don’t know?”

“Oh my God!” In ecstasy Gretchen put her hand on Surendra’s arm. “I bet he’s one of Eliot’s—!”

At that moment the French doors opened and Penny came striding quickly toward them, stiff-legged, his shirt untucked, no jacket on. His pale round face came looming up out of the dusk. His expression was blank and fixed, his walk hyperanimated by a crazy energy. As he got closer he took an extra little skip step, cocked his arm back, and punched Quentin in the face.

Fighting was almost unheard of at Brakebills. Students gossiped and politicked and sabotaged one another’s P.A. experiments, but actual physical violence was vanishingly rare. Back in Brooklyn Quentin had seen fights, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who got mixed up in them. He wasn’t a bully, and his height made it inconvenient for bullies to pick on him. He didn’t have any siblings. He hadn’t been seriously punched since elementary school.

There was a freeze-frame moment of Penny’s fist, close-up and huge, like a comet passing dangerously close to the Earth, and then a flashbulb went off in Quentin’s right eye. It was a straight shot, and he half spun away and brought up his hand to touch the spot in the universal gesture of I’ve-just-been-punched-in-the-face. He was still trying to get his mind around what had just happened when Penny hit him again. This time Quentin ducked enough that he caught it on his ear.

“Ow!” Quentin yelled, scrambling backward. “What the hell?”

Dozens of windows looked out on the terrace from the House, and Quentin had a blurred impression of rows of fascinated faces pressed up against them.

Surendra and Gretchen stared at Quentin in white-faced horror, their mouths open, as if what was happening were his fault. Penny obviously had some theatrical notions about how a fight should go, because he was bouncing on his feet and doing little fake jabs and weaving his head around like boxers in movies.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Quentin shouted at him, more shocked than hurt.

Penny’s jaw was clenched, and his breath hissed in and out between his teeth. There was saliva on his chin, and his eyes looked weird — the phrase “fixed and dilated” flashed through Quentin’s mind. Penny aimed a big roundhouse punch at Quentin’s head, and Quentin flinched away violently, ducking and covering his head with his arms. He recovered enough to grab Penny around the waist while he was still off balance.

They staggered back and forth like a pair of drunken waltzers, leaning on each other for support, then crashed into a shrubbery at the edge of the terrace. It dropped its payload of snow on them. Quentin was a couple of inches taller than Penny, and his arms were longer, but Penny was made of more solid stuff and could throw him around. A low stone bench cut them off at the knees, and they both fell over, Penny on top.

The back of Quentin’s head hit the stone terrace hard. Lightning flashed. It hurt, but at the same time it had the effect of sweeping away all of Quentin’s fear, and most of his conscious thoughts, like somebody sweeping the dishes off a table with both arms. In their place it substituted blind rage.

They rolled over each other, both trying to get in a punch and grabbing at the other one’s arms so he couldn’t. There was blood: Penny had cut his forehead open somehow. Quentin wanted to get up so they could box. He wanted to deck Penny, lay him out flat. He was vaguely aware of an enraged Gretchen trying to hit Penny with her stick and hitting him instead.

He was on top and just about had his fist free for a good hard shot when he felt strong arms encircle his chest, almost tenderly, and lift him back and up. With Quentin’s weight off him Penny popped up on his toes like an electric toy, breathing hard, red running down his face, but there were people between them now, the crowd had enveloped them, Quentin was being pulled backward. The spell was broken. The fight was over.

The next hour was a jumble of unfamiliar rooms and people leaning down to talk to him earnestly and dab at his face with rough cloths. An older woman with an enormous bosom whom he’d never seen before worked a spell with cedar and thyme that made his face feel better. She put something cold that he couldn’t see on the back of his head where it hit the terrace, whispering in an unfamiliar Asian language. The throbbing faded some.

He still felt a little off — he wasn’t in pain, but it was like he was wearing deep-sea diving gear, clumping in slow motion through the hallways, heavy and weightless at the same time, brushing past the curious fish that peered at him and then quickly skittered away. The kids his age and younger regarded his battered face with awe — his ear was swollen, and he had a monster black eye. The older kids found the whole thing funny. Quentin decided to roll with the amusement. He did his best to project calm good humor. For a moment Eliot’s face swam in front of him with a look of sympathy that made Quentin’s eyes flood with hot tears that he viciously suppressed. It turned out it had been Eliot and those very same Physical Kids, speak of the devil, who had broken up the fight. Those powerful, gentle arms that pulled him off Penny belonged to Eliot’s friend Josh Hoberman — the fat one.

He’d missed most of dinner, so he sat down as they were serving dessert, which seemed consistent with the backward quality of the whole day. They waived the rule about late arrivals. He couldn’t shake the thickheaded feeling — he watched the world through a long-range lens, heard it through a tumbler pressed against a wall. He still hadn’t figured out what the fight had been about. Why would Penny hit him? Why would anybody do that? Why come to somewhere like Brakebills just to screw it up by being an asshole?

He figured he should probably eat something, but the first bite of flour-less chocolate cake turned to sticky glue in his mouth, and he had to sprint to make it to the bathroom before he threw up. At which point a massive gravitational field gripped him and pressed him roughly and irrevocably down against the grimy bathroom floor, as if a giant had slapped him down with his mighty hand and then, when he was down far enough, leaned on him with all his weight, smooshing him down into the cool, dirty tiles.

Quentin woke up in darkness. He was in bed, but not his own bed. His head hurt.

Woke up might have been putting it too strongly. The focus wasn’t sharp, and his brain wasn’t completely sure that its integrity was uncompromised. Quentin knew Brakebills had an infirmary, but he’d never been there before. He didn’t even know where it was. He’d passed through another secret portal, this time into the world of the sick and injured.

A woman was fussing over him, a pretty woman. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but he felt her cool, soft fingertips moving over his skull.

He cleared his throat, tasted something bitter.

“You’re the paramedic. You were the paramedic.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Past tense is better, that was a one-time performance. Though I won’t say I didn’t enjoy myself.”

“You were there. The day I came here.”

“I was there,” she agreed. “I wanted to make sure you made it to the Examination.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I come here sometimes.”

“I’ve never seen you here.”

“I make a point of not being seen.”

A long pause followed, during which he might have slept. But she was still there when he opened his eyes again.

“I like the hair,” he said.

She was no longer wearing her paramedic’s uniform, and her dark hair was up, held in place with chopsticks, revealing more of her small, jewel-like face. She had seemed so young before, and she didn’t look any different now, but he wondered. She had the gravity of a much older woman.

“Those braids were a bit much,” she said.

“That man who died — what really happened to him? Why did he die?”

“No special reason.” A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. “He wasn’t supposed to, he just did. People do.”

“I thought it might have something to do with my being there.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your sense of self-importance. Turn over on your stomach.”

Quentin did, and she dabbed the back of his head with a liquid that smelled sharply and stung.

“So it didn’t mean anything?”

“Death always means something. But no, nothing apart from the usual. There, all done. You have to take care of yourself, Quentin. We need you in fighting trim.”

He rolled onto his back again. His pillow had grown cool while she worked. He closed his eyes. He knew that a more alert Quentin would be working harder to zero in precisely on who she was, and what part she was playing in his story, or he in hers. But he couldn’t.

“That book you gave me,” he said. “I think I lost it. I didn’t have a chance to read it.”

In his depleted, borderline demented state the loss of the Fillory book suddenly seemed very sad, a tragedy beyond all possibility of redemption. A warm tear rolled down his cheek and into his ear.

“Hush,” she said. “It wasn’t time yet. You’ll find it again, if you look hard enough. That much I can promise you.”

It was the kind of thing people always said about Fillory. She placed something cool on his burning forehead, and he lost consciousness.

When he woke up again she was gone. But he wasn’t alone.

“You had a concussion,” somebody said.

It might have been the voice that finally woke him up. It had been calling his name. He recognized it, but he couldn’t place it. It was calm and familiar in a way he found comforting.

“Hey, Q. Q? Are you awake? Professor Moretti said you had a concussion.”

It was Penny’s voice. He could even see the pale oval of Penny’s face, propped up on pillows, across the aisle from him and one bed down.

“That’s why you threw up. It must have been when we fell over that bench. You hit your head on the ground.” All the crazy anger had drained out of Penny. He was positively chatty now.

“Yeah. I know I hit my head,” Quentin said slowly, thickly. “It was my head.”

“It won’t affect your mental functioning, if you’re wondering about that. That’s what Moretti said. I asked.”

“Well that’s a relief.”

A long silence passed. A clock ticked somewhere. There was a lovely sequence in the last Fillory book, The Wandering Dune, when little Jane, the youngest Chatwin, catches a bad cold and spends a week in bed talking to the Drawing Master on board the good ship Windswept, attended to by soft, sympathetic bunnies. Quentin had always liked Jane. She was different from the other Chatwins: more thoughtful, with an unpredictable sense of humor and a sharper edge than her slightly saccharine, Dick-and-Jane siblings.

He wondered what time it was.

“What about you?” he said numbly. He wasn’t so sure he was willing to make nice just yet. “Did you get hurt?”

“I cut open my forehead on your tooth. And you broke my nose when you head-butted me. They fixed it with a Pulaski’s Mending. I’ve never seen it done like that before, at least not on a human being. She used goat’s milk.”

“I didn’t even know I head-butted you.”

Penny was quiet again. Quentin counted thirty ticks of the clock.

“Do you have a black eye?” Penny said. “I can’t see.”

“Huge one.”

“Thought so.”

There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Quentin gulped it gratefully and fell back on the pillow. Hot veins of pain flashed through his head. Whatever the paramedic had done, or whoever she was, he still had some healing to do.

“Penny. Why the hell did you hit me like that?”

“Well, I think I had to,” Penny said. He sounded a little shocked that Quentin would even ask.

“You had to.” Maybe he wasn’t too tired after all. “But I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t do anything.” Penny chuckled woodenly. His voice was oddly cool, as if he’d rehearsed this speech, his closing argument, many times. Behind it Quentin could hear that weird manic anger ramping back up. “You could have talked to me, Quentin. You could have shown me a little respect. You and your little girlfriend.”

Oh, God. Was this really how it was going to be?

“Penny, who are you even talking about? Are you talking about Alice?”

“Oh, come on, Quentin. You sit there, you give each other little looks, you laugh at me. Openly. Would you believe I actually thought it was going to be fun? That we were all going to work together? Would you believe I actually thought that?”

Quentin recognized Penny’s aggrieved tone. Once his parents had rented out the parlor floor of their brownstone to an apparently sane little man, an actuary, who had left them increasingly high-handed notes requesting that they stop videotaping him every time he took out the trash.

“Don’t be an ass,” Quentin said. He didn’t see this as a rise-above-it situation. What, was Penny going to come over and give him another concussion? “Do you even know what you look like to the rest of the world? You sit there with your big-ass punk attitude, and you expect people to come around begging to hang out with you?”

Penny was sitting up now.

“That night,” he said, “when you and Alice went off together. You didn’t apologize, you didn’t ask me, didn’t say goodbye, you just walked right out. And then, and then,” he finished triumphantly, “you passed? And I failed? How is that fair? How is that fair? What did you expect me to do?”

So that was it. “That’s right, Penny,” Quentin said. “You definitely should have hit me in the face because you didn’t pass a test. Why don’t you go hit Professor Van der Weghe, too?”

“I don’t take things lying down, Quentin.” Penny’s voice was very loud in the empty infirmary. “I don’t want trouble. But if you come after me, I swear to you that I will get right back in your face. That’s just how it works. You think this is your own private fantasy world? You think you can do whatever you want? You try to walk all over me, Quentin. I’m going to come right back at you!”

They were both talking so loudly that Quentin didn’t even notice when the infirmary door opened and Dean Fogg came in, dressed in an exquisitely embroidered silk kimono and a Dickensian nightcap. For a second Quentin thought he was holding a candle before he realized it was Fogg’s upraised index finger that was softly glowing.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly.

“Dean Fogg—” Penny began as if here, finally, was a voice of reason he could appeal to.

“I said that’s enough.” Quentin had never heard the Dean raise his voice, and he didn’t now. Fogg was always a faintly ridiculous figure in the daytime, but now, at night, wreathed in his kimono, in the alien confines of the infirmary, he looked powerful and otherworldly. Wizardly. “You’re not going to speak again except to answer my questions. Is that clear?”

Did that count as a question? To be safe Quentin just nodded. His head hurt worse now.

“Yes sir,” Penny said promptly.

“I have heard absolutely enough about this. Who instigated this appalling incident?”

“I did,” Penny said instantly. “Sir. Quentin didn’t do anything, he had nothing to do with it.”

Quentin said nothing. That was the funny thing about Penny. He was insane, but he did have his insane principles, and he stuck to them.

“And yet,” Fogg said, “somehow your nose found its way into the path of Quentin’s forehead. Will it happen again?”

“No, sir.”

“No.”

“All right.” Quentin heard springs chirp as the Dean sat down on an empty bed. He didn’t turn his head. “There is only one thing that pleases me about this afternoon’s altercation, which is that neither of you resorted to magic to hurt each other. Neither of you is advanced enough in your studies to understand this properly, but in time you will learn that wielding magic means working with enormously powerful energies. And controlling those energies requires a calm and dispassionate mind.

“Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells… if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.”

Fogg regarded them both with stern composure. Very dramatic. Quentin looked up at the infirmary’s pressed-tin ceiling stubbornly. His consciousness was guttering and fading. Where was the part where he told Penny to stop being a dick?

“Listen to me carefully,” Fogg was saying. “Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.

“But you live in the magical world, and it’s a great gift. And if you want to get killed here, you’ll find plenty of opportunities without killing each other.”

He stood up to go.

“Will we be punished, sir?” Penny asked.

Punished? He must honestly believe they were still in high school. The Dean paused at the door. The light from his finger was almost extinguished.

“Yes, Penny, as a matter of fact you will be. Six weeks of washing dishes, lunch and dinner. If this or anything like it happens again, you’re expelled. Quentin—” he stopped to consider. “Just learn to handle yourself better. I don’t want any more problems.”

The door closed behind him. Quentin exhaled. He closed his eyes, and the room drifted silently off its moorings and out to sea. He wondered, with no special interest either way, whether Penny was in love with Alice.

“Wow,” Penny said, apparently unfazed by the prospect of spending the next month and a half with pruny fingertips. He sounded like a little kid. “I mean, wow. Did you hear what he said? About magic consuming you? I didn’t know any of that. Did you know any of that stuff?”

“Penny,” Quentin said. “One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won’t just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.”

THE PHYSICAL KIDS

Six months later, in September, Quentin and Alice spent the first day of their Third Year at Brakebills sitting outside a small square Victorian outbuilding about a half mile from the House. It was a piece of pure folly architecture, a miniature house, white with a gray roof, complete with windows and gables, that might at one time have been servants’ quarters, or a guest cottage, or a largish garden shed.

There was a weathervane on top, wrought iron and shaped like a pig, that always pointed somewhere other than where the wind was blowing. Quentin couldn’t make out anything through the windows, but he thought he heard snatches of conversation coming from inside. The cottage stood on the edge of a wide hayfield.

It was midafternoon. The sky was blue and the early autumn sun was high. The air was silent and still. A rusted-out old piece of farm machinery stood half drowned in the same long grass it used to mow.

“This is bullshit. Knock again.”

“You knock,” Alice said. She released a convulsive sneeze. “I’ve been knocking for twenty… for twenty…”

She sneezed again. She was allergic to pollen.

“Bless you.”

“Twenty minutes. Thank you.” She blew her nose. “They’re in there, they just won’t open the door.”

“What do you think we should do?”

Quentin thought for a minute.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s a test.”

Back in June, after finals, all twenty members of the Second Year had been marched through the Practical Applications room one at a time to be assigned their Disciplines. The sessions were scheduled at two-hour intervals, though sometimes it took longer; the entire process lasted three days. It was a circus atmosphere. Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point? But it was traditional for every student to have one, so a Discipline every student would have. Alice called it her magic bat mitzvah.

The P.A. lab was transformed for the occasion. All the cabinets were open, and every inch of the counters and tabletops was crammed with old instruments made of wood and silver and etched brass and worked glass. There were calipers and bulbs and beakers and clockwork and scales and magnifying glasses and dusty glass bulbs full of wobbling mercury and other less easily identifiable substances. Brakebills was largely dependent on Victorian-era technology. It wasn’t an affectation, or not entirely; electronics, Quentin was told, behaved unpredictably in the presence of sorcery.

Professor Sunderland presided over the circus. Quentin had avoided her as much as possible since that horrible, dreamlike period when she tutored him during his first semester. His crush on her had faded to a faint but still pathetic echo of its former self, to the point where he could almost look at her and not want to fill his hands with her hair.

“I’ll be with you in just one minute!” she said brightly, busily repacking a set of very fine, sharp-looking silver instruments in a velvet carrying case.

“So.” She snapped the case shut and latched it. “Everybody at Brakebills has an aptitude for magic, but there are individual variations — people tend to have an affinity for some specific strain.” She delivered this speech by rote, like a stewardess demonstrating in-flight safety procedures. “It’s a very personal thing. It has to do with where you were born, and where the moon was, and what the weather was like, and what kind of person you are, plus all kinds of technical stuff that’s not worth getting into. There are two hundred or so other factors which Professor March would be happy to list for you. It’s one of his specialties. In fact I think Disciplines are his Discipline.”

“What’s your Discipline?”

“It’s related to metallurgy. Any other personal questions?”

“Yes. Why do we have to go through all this testing? Can’t you just figure my Discipline out from my birthday and all that stuff you just mentioned?”

“You could. In theory. In practice it would just be a pain in the ass.” She smiled and put her blond hair up and secured it with a clip, and a sharp shard of his old yen for her pierced Quentin’s heart. “It’s much easier to go at it inductively, from the outside in, till we get a hit.”

She placed a bronze scarab in each of his hands and asked him to recite the alphabet, first in Greek, then in Hebrew, which he had to be prompted on, while she studied him through what looked like a many-crooked collapsible telescope. He could feel the metal beetles crackling and buzzing with old spells. He had a horrible fear that their little legs would suddenly start wriggling. Occasionally she would stop and have him repeat a letter while she adjusted the instrument by means of protruding screws.

“Mm,” she said. “Uh-huh.”

She produced a tiny bonsai fir tree and made him stare at it from different angles while it ruffled its tiny needles in response to a wind that wasn’t there. Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately.

“Well, you’re not an herbalist!” she said.

Over the next hour she tested him in two dozen different ways, only a few of which he understood the point of. He ran through basic First Year spells while she watched and measured their effectiveness with a battery of instruments. She had him read an incantation while standing next to a large brass clock with seven hands, one of which circled its face backward and with disconcerting speed. She sighed heavily. Several times she took down sagging, overweight volumes from high shelves and consulted them for long, uncomfortable intervals.

“You’re an interesting case,” she said.

There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.

He sorted pearl buttons of various sizes and colors into different piles while she studied his reflection in a silver mirror. She tried to get him to take a nap so she could pry into his dreams, but he couldn’t fall asleep, so she put him under with one sip of a minty, effervescent potion.

Apparently his dreams didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She stared at him for a long minute with her hands on her hips.

“Let’s try an experiment,” she said finally, with forced liveliness. She smiled thinly and tucked a stray strand of hair back behind her ear.

Professor Sunderland walked down the length of the room closing the dusty wooden shutters with a clatter until it was dark. Then she cleared the clutter off a gray slate tabletop and boosted herself up onto it. She yanked her skirt down over her knees and motioned for him to sit facing her on the table opposite.

“Go like this,” she said, holding up her hands as if she were about to conduct an invisible orchestra. Unladylike half-moons of sweat bloomed under the arms of her blouse. He went like this.

She led him through a series of gestures familiar to him from Popper, though he’d never seen them put together in quite that combination. She whispered some words he didn’t catch.

“Now go like this.” She flung her hands up over her head.

When she did it, nothing happened. But when Quentin mirrored her, streams of fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing — it was like they’d been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.

The relief was almost unbearable. He did it again and a few more sparks flew out, weaker this time. He watched them trail down around him. The third time he got only one.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Professor Sunderland said. “I’ll put you down as Undetermined. We’ll try again next year.”

“Next year?” Quentin watched with a rising sense of disappointment as she jumped down off the table and started reopening shutters, window by window. He winced at the sunlight flooding in. “What do you mean? What am I going to do till then?”

“Wait,” she said. “It happens. People put too much importance on these things. Be a darling and send in the next student, would you? We’re already running late, and it’s only noon.”

The summer dragged by in slow motion. It was really the fall, of course, in the world outside Brakebills, and the Brooklyn Quentin came home to for summer vacation was chilly and gray, the streets plastered with wet brown leaves and mashed ginkgo balls that smelled like vomit.

He haunted his old house like a ghost — it took a special effort to make himself visible to his parents, who always looked vaguely surprised when their phantom son requested their attention. James and Julia were away at college, so Quentin took long walks. He visited the branching, angular Gowanus Canal, its water the green of pooled radiator fluid. He shot baskets on deserted courts with missing nets and rainwater puddles in the corners. The autumn cold gave the ball a dead, inert feel. His world wasn’t here, it was elsewhere. He traded desultory e-mails with friends from Brakebills — Alice, Eliot, Surendra, Gretchen — and flipped indifferently through his summer reading, an eighteenth-century History of Magic that appeared quite slim from the outside but turned out to contain, by some subtle bibliographical magic, no fewer than 1,832 pages.

In November he received a cream-colored envelope, which turned up tucked by invisible hands into History of Magic. It contained a stiff letter-pressed card with an elegant engraving of the Brakebills crest, inviting him to return to school at six in the evening by way of a narrow, never-used alleyway next to the First Lutheran Church ten blocks from his house.

He dutifully presented himself at the correct address at the appointed time. This late in the fall the sun set at four thirty in the afternoon, but it was unseasonably mild out, almost warm. Standing there at the entrance to the passageway, looking around for stray vergers who might charge him with trespassing — or worse, offer him spiritual guidance — cars whooshing by in the street behind him, he had never felt so absolutely sure that he was delusional, that Brooklyn was the only reality there was, and that everything which had happened to him last year was just a fanboy hallucination, proof that the boredom of the real world had finally driven him totally and irreversibly out of his mind. The alley was so skinny he practically had to turn sideways to walk down it, his two overstuffed Brakebills duffel bags — they were midnight blue with dark brown trim, school colors — scraping against the sweating stone walls on either side. He was overwhelmingly certain that in thirty seconds he would be standing at the blank wall at the end of the alley.

But then an impossible breath of warm, sweet, late-summer air came wafting toward him from the far end of the alleyway, accompanied by the chirping of crickets, and he could see the green expanse of the Sea. As heavy as his bags were he ran toward it.

Now it was the first day of the semester, and Quentin and Alice were stranded in a baking hot meadow outside a precious white Victorian bungalow. The bungalow was where the students who did Physical Magic met on Tuesday afternoons for their weekly seminar.

When she was tested, Alice displayed a highly technical Discipline involving light manipulation — phosphoromancy, she said it was called — that placed her in Physical Magic. Quentin was there because Physical was the group that had both the fewest total members and the fewest incoming members, so that seemed like the best place to stash him until he had a Discipline of his own. The first seminar had been scheduled for 12:30, and Quentin and Alice had even gotten there early, but now it was almost five, and they’d been out there all afternoon. They were hot and tired and thirsty and annoyed, but neither of them wanted to give up and go back up to the House. If they were going to be Physical Kids, apparently they would have to prove it by getting in the front door.

They sat under a massive spreading beech tree that stood nearby, coolly indifferent to their plight. They leaned back against the trunk with a fat hard gray root between them.

“So what do you want to do,” Quentin said dully. Tiny motes drifted by in the late-afternoon sunlight.

“I don’t know.” Alice sneezed again. “What do you want to do?”

Quentin plucked at the grass. A burst of faint laughter came from inside the house. If there was a password they hadn’t found it. He and Alice had spent an hour looking for hidden writing — they scanned the door in every spectrum they could think of, visible and invisible, infrared to gamma, and tried to strip the paint off to look underneath, but it wouldn’t come. Alice even tried some advanced graphological enchantments on the squiggly grain of the wood itself, but it just stared back at them blankly. They’d sent currents of force twisting into the lock, jiggling the tumblers, but they couldn’t pick it. They looked for a fourth-dimensional path around the door. They’d jointly plucked up their nerve and summoned a kind of phantasmal axe — it wasn’t explicitly against any rule they could think of — but they couldn’t even scratch it. For a while Alice was convinced the door was an illusion, that it didn’t even exist, but it certainly looked and felt real, and neither of them could find any charms or enchantments to dispel.

“Look at it,” Quentin said. “It’s like some lame Hansel and Gretel hut. I thought the Physical Kids were supposed to be cool.”

“Dinner’s in an hour,” Alice said.

“I’ll skip it.”

“It’s lamb tonight, with a rosemary crust. Potatoes au dauphin.” Alice’s eidetic memory retained odd details.

“Maybe we should have our own seminar. Out here.”

She snorted. “Yeah, that’d show ’em.”

The beech tree was on the edge of a field that had just been mown. The giant cinnamon rolls of hay dotting the field cast long shadows.

“You’re a what again? A photomancer?”

“Phosphoromancer.”

“What can you do?”

“I’m not sure yet. I practiced some things over the summer. Focusing light, refracting it, bending it. If you bend light around something, it turns invisible. But I want to understand the theory of it first.”

“Show me something.”

Alice turned shy. It didn’t take much.

“I can hardly do anything.”

“Look, I don’t even have a Discipline. I’m a nothingmancer. I’m a squatmancer.”

“They just don’t know what it is yet. You have your little sparky thing.”

“Same difference. And don’t make fun of my sparky thing. Now bend me some damn light.”

She grimaced, but she got up on her knees on the grass and held up her hand, fingers spread. They were kneeling face-to-face, and he was suddenly aware of her full breasts inside her thin, high-necked blouse.

“Watch the shadow,” she snapped.

She did something with her fingers, and the shadow of her hand disappeared. It was simply gone, leaving behind only a few ghostly rainbow highlights.

“Nice.”

“It’s pathetic, I know.” She waved her hand, scrubbing out the magic. “My whole hand is supposed to go invisible, but I can only do the shadow.”

There was something here. Quentin felt his sulk starting to dispel. This was a test. Physical magic. They weren’t Morris dancing with tree spirits here. This was a brute-force problem.

“What about the other way?” he said slowly. “Could you focus light instead, like a magnifying glass?”

She didn’t answer right away, but he could see her nimble mind take hold of the problem and start turning it over.

“Maybe if I… hm. I think there’s something in Culhwch and Owen. You’d need to stabilize the effect, though. And localize it.”

She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and spoke five long words over it. Quentin could see light bending inside the circle, warping and distorting the leaves and grass visible through it. Then it sharpened and focused to a white dot that burned an afterimage into his retina, and he looked away. She tilted it, and the ground under her hand smoked.

“I will kill you if you get me kicked out of Brakebills. Do you understand me? I’m not joking. I know how to do it. I will literally make you die.”

“That’s funny, that’s exactly what I told Penny after he hit me,” Quentin said.

“Except I’ll really do it.”

They had decided to burn their way through the door. If it was a test, Quentin reasoned, it didn’t matter much how they solved it as long as they solved it. They hadn’t been given any rules, so they couldn’t be breaking any. And if they did burn down the damn house, with Eliot and his smug little friends inside it, serve them right.

They had to work fast, because the sunlight was fading. The sun had already gone dull and coppery, and in another few minutes its lower rim would touch the tops of the trees on the far side of the hayfield. The barest early-fall chill was in the air. Yellow lights were already on inside the house. Quentin heard — did he imagine it? — the pop of a cork being withdrawn from a bottle.

Holding both arms above her head and curved slightly upward, like she was balancing a large invisible basket on her head, Alice had created the magical equivalent of a magnifying glass a dozen yards across — her bent arms defined a small section of the total circumference of a soaring circular lens, the upper edge of which was even with the top of the beech tree, taller than the chimney of the little Victorian bungalow. Quentin could just make out the edge of the lens as a curved distortion in the air. The focal point was too bright to look at.

Alice stood about fifty feet back from the door. Quentin stood closer, to one side, holding out a hand to shield his eyes and shouting out directions:

“Up! Okay, slow! A little more! Keep moving! Okay, now right!”

Quentin could feel the heat from the focused sunlight against his face and smell the savory-sweet smell of wood smoke, along with an acrid tang of seared house paint. The door was definitely vulnerable to heat. They’d been worried that there wouldn’t be enough sunlight left, but Alice’s spell was cutting a nice deep charred trench in the wood. They’d decided to cut the door in half laterally, and if the trench wasn’t penetrating all the way through, it must be pretty close. A bigger problem was Alice’s aim, which wasn’t good, and in one place she had wandered off the door and burned a groove in the wall.

“I feel stupid!” Alice shouted. “How are we doing?”

“Looking good!”

“My back hurts! Are we almost done?”

“Almost!” he lied.

With a foot to go Alice expanded the spell’s radius to compensate for the fading sun. She was whispering, but he wasn’t sure if it was an incantation or just obscenities. Quentin realized they were being observed: one of the older professors, a very erect, white-haired man named Brzezinski, who specialized in potions and whose pants were always covered with appalling stains, had interrupted his evening stroll to watch them. In another lifetime he had given Quentin the test involving knots during his Examination. He wore sweater-vests and smoked a pipe and looked like an IBM engineer, circa 1950.

Shit, Quentin thought. They were about to get busted.

But Professor Brzezinski just took his pipe out of his mouth. “Carry on,” he said gruffly. He turned and walked back in the direction of the House.

It took only about ten minutes for Alice to make a full lateral cut, then go back across it a second time. The trench glowed red.

When she was finished, Quentin walked back to where she was standing.

“You have ash on your face,” she said. She brushed at his forehead with her fingers.

“Maybe we should go across again. You know, just to be sure.” If this didn’t work, he was out of ideas, and he didn’t think he could spend the night out here. He also didn’t think he could face going back to the House in defeat.

“There’s not enough light.” She looked drained. “By the end the lens was probably out to a quarter mile. After that it just loses coherence. Falls apart at the edges.”

A quarter mile? Quentin thought. How powerful is she?

His stomach rumbled. It was fully dusk now, and the sky was a luminous blue. They stared at the scarred, blackened door. It looked worse than he thought — Alice’s aim had strayed on the second pass, so in places there were two separate trenches. If this was wrong, Eliot was going to kill him.

“Should I try to kick it in?”

Alice pulled her mouth to one side. “What if there’s somebody behind it?”

“So what do you suggest?”

“I don’t know.” She picked at one of the burnt parts that had cooled. “I think we’re almost through…”

There was an old iron knocker on the door in the shape of a disembodied hand holding an iron ball. It was bolted on.

“Okay,” Quentin said. “Stand back.”

God, please let this work. He got a good grip on the iron hand, put one foot on the door, uttered a long falsetto martial arts yell, and threw his weight backward. The top half of the door swung open with no resistance whatsoever — it must have been hanging on by a few flakes of ash. He fell down backward on the path.

A girl Quentin recognized as one of the Fourth Years stood in the doorway with warm light streaming out into the twilight around her, holding a glass of dark red wine in one hand. She looked down at him coolly. Alice was leaning against the side of the house laughing so hard that no sound was coming out.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” the girl said. “Eliot made an amatriciana sauce. We couldn’t get any guanciale, but I think bacon works fine. Don’t you?”

In spite of the heat a fire popped and flickered in the fireplace.

“Six hours, twelve minutes,” said a fat young man with wavy hair sitting in a leather club chair. “That’s actually about par.”

“Tell them how long it took you, Josh,” said the girl who’d met them at the door. Quentin thought her name was Janet.

“Twenty hours, thirty-one minutes. Longest night of my life. Not a record, but pretty close.”

“We thought he was trying to starve us out.” Janet poured out the rest of a bottle of red wine into two glasses standing on a sideboard and handed them to Quentin and Alice. Two more empty bottles stood on the floor, though the others didn’t seem especially drunk.

They were in a shabby but comfortable library lined with threadbare rugs and lit by candles and firelight. Quentin realized that the little house must be larger on the inside than it was on the outside; it was also a lot cooler — the atmosphere was that of a nice, chilly fall evening. Books overflowed the bookcases and stood in wobbly stacks in the corners and even on the mantelpiece. The furniture was distinguished but mismatched, and in places it was severely battered. In between the bookcases the walls were hung with the usual inexplicable artifacts that accumulate in private clubs: African masks, dreary landscape paintings, retired ceremonial daggers, glass cases full of maps and medals and the deteriorating corpses of exotic moths that had presumably been captured at great effort and expense. Quentin felt overheated and underdressed but mostly just relieved to finally be inside.

There were only five of them, counting himself and Alice. Eliot was there, scanning one of the bookshelves and acting like he hadn’t noticed them yet. He seemed to be trying to make a serious argument about magical theory to somebody, but nobody was listening

“Tinkerbell, we have guests,” Janet said. “Please turn around and face the room.” She was lean and animated, with a serious, somewhat anachronistic pageboy haircut. She was the loud one: Quentin had seen her holding forth to the others on walks through the Maze and making speeches over dinner in the dining room.

Eliot broke off his monologue and turned around. He was wearing an apron.

“Hello,” he said, not missing a beat. “Glad you could make it. Alice, I understand you burned our door in half.”

“Quentin helped.”

“We watched you out the window,” Josh said. “You’re hella lucky Brzezinski didn’t catch you with that axe.”

“What’s the correct solution?” Alice asked. “I mean, I know it worked, but there must be a better way.”

She took a timid sip of her wine, immediately followed by a less timid one.

“There isn’t one,” Janet said. “Or not a good one, anyway. That’s part of the point. This is Physical Magic. It’s messy. It’s crude. As long as you don’t knock the building down, it counts. And if you did it would probably still count.”

“How did you do it?” Alice asked shyly. “I mean, when it was your turn?”

“Froze and shattered it. I do a special kind of cold magic, that’s my Discipline. Sixty-three minutes. And that is a record.”

“It used to be you could say ‘friend’ in Elvish and it would let you in,” Josh said. “Now too many people have read Tolkien.”

“Eliot, darling, I think our dinner must be ready,” Janet said. Her attitude toward Eliot was hard to read, a weird combination of tenderness and contempt. She clapped her hands. “Josh, maybe you could do something about…?” She gestured in the direction of the half-demolished door. “The mosquitoes are getting in.”

Still dazed, Quentin trailed Eliot into the kitchen, which was, again, larger and nicer than really seemed plausible from the outside, with white cabinets up to the high ceiling and soapstone counters and an aerodynamic-looking 1950s refrigerator. Eliot sloshed some wine from his glass into a pan of red sauce on the stove.

“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.”

He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that he’d ignored Quentin for the past year. It was like it never happened.

“So you have this whole place to yourself?” Quentin didn’t want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here.

“Pretty much. So do you, now.”

“Do all the Disciplines have their own clubhouses?”

“It’s not a clubhouse,” Eliot said sharply. He dumped a huge clump of fresh pasta into a tall pot of boiling water and stirred it to break it up. “This’ll cook in about a minute flat.”

“Then what is it?”

“Well, all right, it is a clubhouse. But don’t call it that. We call it the Cottage. We have the seminars here, and the library isn’t bad. Sometimes Janet paints in the bedroom upstairs. Only we can get in here, you know.”

“What about Fogg?”

“Oh, and Fogg, though he never bothers. And Bigby. You know Bigby, right?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I can’t believe you don’t know Bigby!” Eliot said, chuckling. “God, you’re going to love Bigby.”

He tasted the sauce, then glugged in a slug of heavy cream and stirred it in in widening circles. The sauce paled and thickened. Eliot had a jaunty, offhanded confidence at the stove.

“All the groups have a place like this. The Naturals have this deeply lame treehouse off in the forest. The Illusionists have a house just like this one, though only they know where it is. You have to find it to get in. Knowledge just has the library, the poor suckers. And Healing has the clinic—”

“Eliot!” Janet’s voice came from the other room. “We’re starving.” Quentin wondered how Alice was faring out there.

“All right, all right! I hope you don’t mind pasta,” he added, to Quentin. “It’s all I made. There’s bruschetta out there, or there was. At least there’s lots of wine.” He drained the pasta in the sink, sending up a huge gout of steam, and dumped it into the pan to finish in the sauce. “God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?

“Richard was the real cook around here. I don’t know if you knew him, he graduated last year. Tall. Total grind, made us all look bad in front of Bigby, but at least he could cook. Grab those two bottles there, would you? And the corkscrew?”

With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware, some of which bordered on light hand-to-hand weaponry, the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. The food was simple but not at all bad. He’d forgotten he was starving. Janet performed a trick — Quentin wasn’t sure whether it was magical or just mechanical — to shorten the long seminar table into a dinner table.

Janet, Josh, and Eliot gossiped about classes and teachers and who was sleeping with whom and who wanted to sleep with whom. They speculated endlessly about other students’ relative strengths as spellcasters. They maneuvered around one another with the absolute confidence of people who had spent huge amounts of time together, who trusted and loved one another and who knew how to show one another off to best advantage and how to curb each other’s boring and annoying habits. Quentin let the chatter wash over him. Eating a sophisticated meal, alone in their own private dining room, felt very adult. This was it, he thought. He had been an outsider before, but now he had really entered into the inner life of the school. This was the real Brakebills. He was in the warm secret heart of the secret world.

They were arguing about what they would do after they graduated.

“I imagine I’ll retreat to some lonely mountaintop,” Eliot said airily. “Become a hermit for a while. I’ll grow a long beard and people will come to me for advice, like in cartoons.”

“Advice about what?” Josh snorted. “About whether a dark suit counts as black tie?”

“And I’d like to see you try to grow a beard,” Janet added. “God, you’re self-centered. Don’t you want to help people?”

Eliot looked puzzled. “People? What people?”

“Poor people! Hungry people! Sick people! People who can’t do magic!”

“What have people ever done for me? People don’t want my help. People called me a faggot and threw me in a Dumpster at recess when I was in fifth grade because my pants were pressed.”

“Well, I hope for your sake there’s a wine cellar on your mountaintop,” Janet said, annoyed. “Or a full bar. You won’t last eight hours without a drink.”

“I will brew a crude but potent beverage from local herbs and berries.”

“Or dry cleaning.”

“Well, that is a problem. You can use magic, but it’s never the same. Maybe I’ll just live at the Plaza, like Eloise.”

“I’m bored!” Josh bellowed. “Let’s do Harper’s Fire-Shaping.”

He went over to a large cabinet full of dozens of tiny drawers, narrow but deep, that turned out to be a kind of miniature twig library. Each drawer bore a tiny handwritten label, starting with Ailanthus in the upper left-hand corner and ending with Zelkova, Japanese, in the lower right. Harper’s Fire-Shaping was a useless but extremely entertaining spell for stretching and leading a flame into elaborate calligraphic shapes that flared for a moment in midair and then disappeared. You did it with an aspen twig. The evening devolved into attempts to shape the candle flames into increasingly elaborate or obscene words and shapes, which in turn led, inevitably, to the curtains catching on fire (apparently not for the first time) and having to be extinguished.

A halt was called. Eliot produced a slender, dangerous-looking bottle of grappa. Only two of the candles had survived the fire-shaping, but nobody bothered to replace the others. It was late, after one in the morning. They sat there in the half darkness in contented silence. Janet lay on her back on the carpet staring up at the ceiling, her feet propped up on Eliot’s lap. There was a funny physical intimacy between the two of them, especially considering what Quentin knew about Eliot’s sexual appetites.

“So this is it? We’re full-fledged Physical Kids now?” The grappa was like a fiery seed that had drifted into Quentin’s chest and taken root there. The seed gave birth to a hot, glowing sapling, which grew and spread and unfolded into a big warm leafy tree of good feeling. “Don’t we have to be hazed or branded or, I don’t know, shaved or something?”

“Not unless you want to be,” Josh said.

“Somehow I thought there would be more of you,” Quentin said. “Of us.”

“This is it,” Eliot said. “Since Richard and Isabel graduated. There aren’t any Fifth Years. Nobody placed in. If we didn’t get anybody this year, Fogg was talking about merging us with Natural.”

Josh shuddered theatrically.

“What were they like?” Alice asked. “Richard and Isabel?”

“Like fire and ice,” Josh said. “Like chocolate and marzipan.”

“It’s different without them,” Eliot said.

“Good riddance,” said Janet.

“Oh, they weren’t so bad,” Josh said. “You remember when Richard thought he could bring the weathervane to life? He was going to make it move around by itself. He must have been up there for three days rubbing it with fish oil and I don’t even want to think about what else.”

“That was unintentionally funny,” Janet said. “Doesn’t count.”

“You just never got the point of Richard.”

Janet snorted.

“I got plenty of Richard,” she said, with surprising bitterness.

A tiny hush fell. It was the first false note of the evening.

“But now we have a quorum again,” Eliot said quickly, “an eminently respectable quorum. Physical Magic always gets the best ones.”

“To the best ones,” Josh said.

Quentin raised his glass. He was up in the lofty branches of his fiery tree, swaying in the warm alcoholic breeze.

“The best ones.”

They all drank.

THE BEAST

The entire time he’d been at Brakebills, through First Year, the exams, the whole disaster with Penny, right up until the night he joined the Physical Kids, Quentin had been holding his breath without knowing it. He realized only now that he’d been waiting for Brakebills to vanish around him like a daydream. Even aside from the many and varied laws of thermodynamics that were violated there on a regular basis, it was just too good to be true. It was like Fillory that way. Fillory never lasted forever. Ember and Umber promptly kicked the Chatwins out at the end of every book. Deep down Quentin felt like a tourist who at the end of the day would be herded back onto some dirty, lumbering, snorting tour bus — with ripped vinyl seats and overhead TVs and a stinking toilet — and shipped home, clutching a tacky souvenir postcard and watching as the towers and hedges and peaks and gables of Brakebills dwindled in the rearview mirror.

But it hadn’t happened. And now he understood, he really got, that it wasn’t going to happen. He’d wasted so much time thinking, It’s all a dream, and It should have been somebody else, and Nothing lasts forever. It was time he started acting like who he was: a nineteen-year-old student at a secret college for real, actual magic.

Now that he was in among them he had some leisure to observe the Physical Kids up close. When he first met Eliot, Quentin assumed that everyone at Brakebills would be like him, but in fact that wasn’t the case at all. For one thing, even in this rarefied setting Eliot’s bizarre personal manner set him apart. For another, he was conspicuously brilliant in class — maybe not quite as quick as Alice, but Alice worked her ass off and Eliot didn’t even try, or if he did he hid it very, very well. As far as Quentin could tell he never studied at all. The only thing in the world that he would actually cop to caring about was his appearance, especially his expensive shirts, which he wore with cuff links, even though it cost him regular menial punishments for violating the dress code.

Josh always wore the standard school uniform but managed to make it look like he didn’t — his jacket never quite fit his wide, round build, it was always twisted or rumpled or too narrow in the shoulders. His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling. It took Quentin a while to figure out that Josh expected people not to take him seriously, and he enjoyed — not always kindly — the moment when they realized, too late, that they’d underestimated him. Because he wasn’t as self-absorbed as Eliot or Janet he was the group’s sharpest observer, and he missed very little of what went on around him. He told Quentin that he’d been waiting for Penny to snap for weeks:

“Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kind of glad he hit you.”

Unlike the other Physical Kids Josh was an undistinguished student, but once he’d mastered a skill he was an exceptionally forceful spellcaster. It was a full six weeks into his first year at Brakebills before he was able to move his marble by magic, but when he finally did — as Eliot told the story — it shot through a classroom window and buried itself six inches in the trunk of a maple tree outside, where it probably still was.

Janet’s parents were lawyers, of the high-flying Hollywood-consorting variety, and colossally wealthy. She grew up in L.A. being babysat by various celebrities, whom under duress — but not very much duress — she would name. Quentin supposed that accounted for the vivid, actressy edge to her manner. She was the most visible of the Physical Kids, loud and brusque and always proposing toasts at dinner. She had terrible taste in men — the best that could be said of her endless series of boyfriends is that none of them lasted long. Pretty rather than beautiful, she had a flat, flapperish figure, but she used what she had to maximum advantage — she sent her uniforms back home to be tailored — and there was something vibrantly sexy about her ravenous, too-wide gaze. You wanted to meet it and be devoured by it.

Janet was about as annoying as a person could be and still be your friend, but Quentin was never bored around her. She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

Even though he was part of the Physical Kids now, Quentin still spent most of his time with the other Third Years: he took his classes with them, and worked with them in P.A., and studied for exams with them, and sat with them at dinner. The Maze had been scrambled and redrawn over the summer — as it was every summer, it turned out — and they spent a week’s worth of afternoons relearning it, yelling at one another over the tall hedges when they got lost or found an especially sweet shortcut.

They threw a party in honor of the fall equinox — there was a strong undercurrent of Wiccan sentiment at Brakebills, though hardly anybody took it seriously except the Naturals. They had a bonfire and music and a Wicker Man, and a light show by the Illusionists, and everybody stayed out way too late, their noses running in the cold fall air, their faces hot and red from the fire. Alice and Quentin taught the others the fire-shaping spell, which was a big hit, and Amanda Orloff revealed that she’d been brewing a batch of mead on the sly for the past couple of months. It was sweet and fizzy and disgusting, and they all drank way too much of it and felt like death the next day.

That fall Quentin’s studies changed again. There was less rote learning of gestures and arcane languages, though God knows there was plenty of that, and more actual spellcasting. They spent an entire month on low-level architectural magic: spells to strengthen foundations and rain-proof roofs and keep gutters free of rotting leaves, all of which they practiced on a pathetic little shed barely larger than a doghouse. Just one spell, to make a roof resistant to lightning, took Quentin three days to memorize, grinding the gestures in a mirror to get them exactly right, at the proper speed and with the proper angles and emphasis. And then there was the incantation, which was in a corrupt old Bedouin Arabic and very tricky. And then Professor March conjured a little rainstorm which emitted a single lightning bolt that sheared through it in one eye-searing, ego-demolishing instant, while Quentin stood there getting soaked to the skin.

On alternate Tuesdays Quentin worked with Bigby, the Physical Kids’ unofficial faculty advisor, who turned out be a small man with large liquid eyes and close-cropped gray hair who dressed neatly, if extremely affectedly, in a long Victorian-looking duster. His posture was slightly hunched, but he didn’t seem otherwise frail or crippled. Quentin had the impression that Bigby was a political refugee from somewhere. He was always making vague noises about the conspiracy that had ousted him, and what he would do following his inevitable return to power. He had the stiff, wounded dignity of the deposed intelligentsia.

One afternoon during a seminar — Bigby specialized in ridiculously difficult enchantments that transmuted elements by manipulating their structure on a quantum level — he paused and performed an odd gesture: he reached back behind first one shoulder, then the other, unbuttoning something back there. The movement reminded Quentin of nothing more than a woman unhooking her bra. When Bigby was finished four magnificent insect wings like a dragonfly’s, two on each side, sprang out from behind him. He flexed them with a deep, satisfied sigh.

The wings were gauzy and iridescent. They disappeared for a second in a buzz of activity, then reappeared as they became still.

“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t stand it a minute more.”

It never stopped, the weirdness of this place. It just went on and on.

“Professor Bigby, are you a—” Quentin stopped. A what? An elf? An angel? He was being rude, but he couldn’t help it. “Are you a fairy?”

Bigby smiled a pained smile. His wings made a dry chitinous rattle.

“Pixie, technically,” he said.

He seemed a little sensitive about it.

One morning, very early, Professor March was giving a lecture on weather magic and summoning cyclonic wind patterns. For a portly man he was surprisingly spry. Just looking at him bouncing on his toes, with his red ponytail and his red face, made Quentin want to go back to bed. In the mornings Chambers served tarry black espresso which he smelted in a delicate, gilded-glass exotic Turkish device. But it was all gone by the time Quentin came down for class.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again Professor March was addressing him directly.

“… between a subtropical cyclone and an extratropical? Quentin? In the French, please, if you can.”

Quentin blinked. He must have drifted off.

“The difference?” he hazarded. “There is no difference?”

There was a long, awkward pause, into which Quentin inserted more words in an attempt to find out what exactly the question had been, and to say “baroclinic zones” as many times as possible just in case they were relevant. People shifted in their chairs. March, having caught the delicious scent of humiliation, was prepared to wait. Quentin waited, too. There was something in the reading about this. He’d actually done it, that was the injustice of it.

The moment stretched on and on. His face was on fire. This wasn’t even magic, it was meteorology.

“I don’t understand—” came a voice from the back of the classroom.

“I’m asking Quentin, Amanda.”

“But maybe you could clarify something?” It was Amanda Orloff. She persisted, with the shit-eating blitheness of somebody who had academic cred to burn. “For the rest of us? Whether these are barotropic cyclones or not? I find it a little confusing.”

“They are all barotropic, Amanda,” March said, exasperated. “It’s irrelevant. All tropical cyclones are barotropic.”

“But I thought one was barotropic and one was baroclinic,” Alice put in.

The resulting mass wrangle ended up being so inane and time-consuming that March was forced to abandon Quentin and move on or lose the entire thread of the lecture. If he could have done so unobtrusively, Quentin would have run back to where Amanda Orloff was sitting and kissed her on her broad, unmoisturized forehead. Instead he settled for blowing her a kiss when March wasn’t looking.

March had segued into a lengthy spell that involved sketching an elaborate mandala-like symbol on the chalkboard. He stopped every thirty seconds and stepped back to the edge of the stage, hands on hips, whispering to himself, then dove back into the design. The point of the spell was fairly trivial — it either guaranteed hail or prevented it, one or the other, Quentin wasn’t really following, and anyway the principle was the same.

Either way, Professor March was struggling with it. The spell was in a very proper and precise Medieval Dutch that evidently wasn’t his forte. It occurred to Quentin that it might be nice if he screwed it up. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed being called out on technical minutiae this early in the morning. He would play a tiny prank.

Brakebills classrooms were proofed against most forms of mischief, but it was well known that the podium was any teacher’s Achilles’ heel. You couldn’t do much to it, but the wards on it weren’t quite ironclad, and with a lot of effort and some body English you could get it to rock back and forth a little. Maybe that would be enough to throw Professor March (the students called him “Death” March) off his game. Quentin made a few small gestures under his desk, between his knees. The podium stirred, as if it were stretching a kink in its back, then became inert again. Success.

March was reeling off some extra Old High Dutch. His attention flicked down at the podium as he felt it move, and he hesitated but recovered his concentration and forged ahead. It was either that or start the whole spell over.

Quentin was disappointed. But Infallible Alice leaned over.

“Idiot,” she whispered. “He dropped the second syllable. He should have said—”

Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened. Except that, like a continuity error in a movie, there was now a man standing behind Professor March.

He was a small man, conservatively dressed in a neat gray English suit and a maroon club tie that was fixed in place with a silver crescent-moon pin. Professor March, who was still talking, didn’t seem to realize he was there — the man looked out at the Third Years archly, conspiratorially, as if they were sharing a joke at the teacher’s expense. There was something odd about the man’s appearance — Quentin couldn’t seem to make out his face. For a second he couldn’t figure out why, and then he realized it was because there was a small leafy branch in front of it that partially obscured his features. The branch came from nowhere. It was attached to nothing. It just hung there in front of the man’s face.

Then Professor March stopped speaking and froze in place.

Alice had stopped, too. The room was silent. A chair creaked. Quentin couldn’t move either. There was nothing restraining him, but the line between his brain and his body had been cut. Was the man doing this? Who was he? Alice was still leaned over slightly in his direction, and a fly-away wisp of her hair hung in his field of vision. He couldn’t see her eyes; the angle was wrong. Everything and everybody was still. The man on the stage was the only thing in the world still in motion.

Quentin’s heart started to pound. The man cocked his head and frowned, as if he could hear it. Quentin didn’t understand what had happened, but something had gone wrong. Adrenaline poured into his bloodstream, but it had nowhere to go. His brain was boiling in its own juices. The man began strolling around the stage, exploring his new environment. His demeanor was that of a gentleman balloonist who had accidentally touched down in exotic surroundings: inquisitive, amused. With the branch in front of his face his intentions were impossible to read.

He circled Professor March. There was something strange about the way he moved, something too fluid about his gait. When he walked into the light, Quentin saw that he wasn’t quite human, or if he had been once he wasn’t anymore. Below the cuffs of his white shirt his hands had three or four too many fingers.

Fifteen minutes crawled by, then half an hour. Quentin couldn’t turn his head, and the man moved in and out of his field of view. He puttered with Professor March’s equipment. He toured the auditorium. He took out a knife and pared his fingernails. Objects stirred and shifted restlessly in place whenever he walked too near them. He picked up an iron rod from March’s demonstration table and bent it like a piece of licorice. Once he cast a spell — he spoke too fast for Quentin to catch the details — that made all the dust in the room fly up and whirl crazily in the air before settling down again. It had no other obvious effect. When he cast the spell, the extra fingers on his hands bent sideways and backward.

An hour passed, then another. Quentin’s fear came and went and came back in huge sweating rushes, crashing waves. He was sure something very bad was happening, it just wasn’t clear yet exactly what. He knew it had something to do with his joke on March. How could he have been so stupid? In a cowardly way he was glad he couldn’t move. It spared him from having to attempt something brave.

The man seemed barely aware that he was in a room full of people. There was something grotesquely comic about him — his silence was like that of a mime. He approached a ship’s clock that hung at the back of the stage and slowly put his fist through it — he didn’t punch it, he forced his hand into its face, breaking the glass and snapping the hands and crushing the mechanism inside until he was satisfied that it was destroyed. It was as if he thought he would hurt it more that way.

Class should have been over ages ago. Somebody on the outside must have noticed by now. Where were they? Where was Fogg? Where the hell was that paramedic-nurse-woman when you really needed her? He wished he knew what Alice was thinking. He wished he could have turned his head just a few degrees more before he’d been frozen, so he could see her face.

Amanda Orloff’s voice broke the silence. She must have gotten loose somehow and was chanting a spell, rhythmically and rapidly but calmly. The spell was like nothing Quentin had ever heard, an angry, powerful piece of magic, full of vicious fricatives — it was offensive magic, battle magic, designed to literally rip an opponent to pieces. Quentin wondered how she’d even learned it. Just knowing a spell like that was way off-limits at Brakebills, let alone casting it. But before she could finish her voice became muffled. It went higher and higher, faster and faster, like a tape speeding up, then faded out before she could finish. The silence returned.

Morning turned into afternoon in a fever dream of panic and boredom. Quentin went numb. He heard signs of activity from outside. He could see only one window, and that was out of the very corner of his eye, but something was going on out there, blocking the light. There were sounds of hammering and, very faintly, six or seven voices chanting in unison. A tremendous, silent flash of light burst behind the door to the corridor with such force that the thick wood glowed translucent for an instant. There were rumblings as if somebody were trying to break through the floor from underneath. None of this visibly bothered the man in the gray suit.

In the window a single red leaf flapped crazily in the wind on the end of a bare branch, having hung on longer into the fall than any of its fellows. Quentin watched it. The wind flailed the leaf back on forth on the end of its stem. It seemed like the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. All he wanted was to go on looking at it for one minute longer. He would give anything for that, just one more minute with his little red leaf.

He must have slipped into a trance, or fallen asleep — he didn’t remember. He woke up to the sound of the man on stage singing softly and high under his breath. His voice was surprisingly tender:

He lapsed into humming. Then, with no warning, he vanished.

It happened so silently and so suddenly that at first Quentin didn’t notice he was gone. In any case his departure was upstaged by Professor March, who’d been standing onstage the entire time with his mouth open. The instant the man was gone March crumpled forward bonelessly off the stage and knocked himself cold on the hardwood floor.

Quentin tried to stand up. Instead he slid off his chair, down onto the floor between the rows of seats. His arms, legs, and back were hideously cramped. There was no strength in them. Slowly, lying on the floor in a mixture of agony and relief, he stretched out his legs. Delicious bubbles of pain released in his knees, as if he were finally unbending them after a trans-hemispherical flight in coach. Tears of relief started in his eyes. It was over. The man was finally gone and nothing terrible had happened. Alice was groaning, too. A pair of shoes, probably hers, was in his face. The whole room rocked with moans and sobs.

Afterward Quentin would learn that Fogg had mustered the entire staff almost immediately, as soon as the man had made his appearance. The school’s defensive spells detected him instantly, even if they didn’t keep him out. By all accounts Fogg made a surprisingly competent battlefield commander: calm, organized, rapid and accurate in his assessment of the situation, skillful in his deployment of the resources at his disposal.

Over the course of the morning an entire temporary scaffold had been constructed around the outside of the tower. Professor Heckler, wearing a welder’s helmet to shield his eyes, had nearly set the tower on fire with pyrotechnical attacks. Professor Sunderland had heroically attempted to phase herself through the wall, but to no avail, and anyway it wasn’t clear what she would have done if she succeeded. Even Bigby made an appearance, deploying some exotic nonhuman witchcraft that — Quentin got the impression — had made the rest of the faculty a little uncomfortable.

That evening after dinner, after the usual announcements about clubs and events and activities had been sullenly and desultorily attended to, Dean Fogg addressed the student body to try to explain what had happened.

He stood at the head of the long dining room table, looking older than usual, as the candles guttered down and the First Years gloomily cleared the last of the silverware. He fussed with his cuffs and touched his temples where he was losing his thin blond hair.

“It will not come as a surprise to many of you that there are other worlds besides our own,” he began. “This is not conjecture, it is fact. I have never been to these worlds, and you will never go there. The art of passing between worlds is an area of magic about which very little is known. But we do know that some of these worlds are inhabited.

“Probably the beast we met today was physically quite vast.” (“The Beast” was what Fogg called the thing in the gray suit, and afterward nobody ever referred to it any other way.) “What we saw would have been a small part of it, an extremity it chose to push into our sphere of being, like a toddler groping around in a tide pool. Such phenomena have been observed before. They are known in the literature as Excrescences.

“Its motivations are difficult to guess.” He sighed heavily. “To such beings we look like swimmers paddling timidly across the surface of their world, silhouetted against the light from above, sometimes diving a little below the surface but never going very deep. Ordinarily they pay no attention to us. Unfortunately something about Professor March’s incantation today caught the Beast’s attention. I understand it may have been corrupted or interrupted in some way. That error offered the Beast an opportunity to enter our world.”

At this Quentin convulsed inwardly but kept his face composed. It had been him. He had done it. Fogg went on.

“The Beast spiraled up out of the depths, like a deep-water shark intent on seizing a swimmer from below. Its motivations are impossible to imagine, but it did appear as if it was looking for something, or someone. I do not know whether it found what it was looking for. We may never know.”

Ordinarily Fogg projected an air of certainty and confidence, tempered by his natural slight ridiculousness, but that night he looked disoriented. He lost his train of thought. He fingered his tie.

“The incident is finished now. The students who witnessed the incident will all be examined, medically and magically, and then cleansed in case the Beast has marked or tagged or tainted them. Tomorrow’s classes are canceled.”

He stopped there and left the room abruptly. Everybody had thought he would say more.

But all that came much later. Lying on the floor after the attack, the agony fading from his arms and legs and back, Quentin felt only good things. He felt relieved to be alive. Disaster had been averted. He had made a terrible mistake, but everything was all right now. He felt a profound gratitude for the old, splintery wooden underside of the chair he was looking up at. It was fascinating and beautiful. He could have looked at it forever. It was even a little thrilling to have been through something like that and lived to tell about it. In a way he was a hero. He breathed deeply and felt the good solid floor under his back. The first thing he wanted to do, he realized, was to put his hand reassuringly on Alice’s warm soft ankle, which was next to his head. He was so grateful to be able to finally look at her again.

He didn’t know yet that Amanda Orloff was dead. The Beast had eaten her alive.

LOVELADY

The rest of Quentin’s Third Year at Brakebills went by beneath a gray watercolor wash of quasi-military vigilance. In the weeks that followed the attack the school was locked down both physically and magically. Faculty members wandered the grounds retracing the lines of its ancient defensive spells, renewing and strengthening them and casting new ones. Professor Sunderland spent an entire day walking backward all the way around the school’s perimeter, scattering colored powders on the snow behind her in carefully braided trails, her plump cheeks turning pink with cold. She was followed by Professor Van der Weghe, who checked her work, and preceded by a gaggle of attentive students who cleared brush and fallen logs out of her path and resupplied her with materiel. It had to be done in one unbroken circuit.

Cleansing the auditorium was just a matter of ringing a few bells and burning sage in the corners, but resetting the school’s main wards took a solid week; according to student rumor they were all cinched to an enormous worked-iron totem kept in a secret room at the campus’s exact geographical center, wherever that was, but nobody had ever seen it. Professor March, who after his ordeal never quite lost a certain anxious, hunted look, roamed endlessly in and out of the school’s many basements and sub-basements and cellars and catacombs, where he obsessively tended and reinforced the foundation spells that secured them against attack from below. The Third Years had made a bonfire at their Equinox party, but now the faculty made a real bonfire, fed with specially prepared cedar logs, dried and peeled and as straight as railroad ties, stacked in an arcane, eye-bending configuration like a giant Chinese puzzle that took Professor Heckler all day to get right. When he finally lit it, using a twist of paper with words scribbled on it in Russian, it burned like magnesium. They were discouraged from looking directly at it.

In a way it was an education in itself, a chance to watch real magic being worked, with real things at stake. But there was no fun in it. There was only silence at dinner, and useless anger, and a new kind of dread. One morning they found the room of a First Year boy cleared out; he’d dropped out and gone home overnight. It was not uncommon to come across conclaves of three or four girls — girls who mere weeks earlier had actively avoided sitting next to Amanda Orloff at dinner — perched together on the stony rim of a fountain in the Maze, weeping and shivering. There were two more fights. As soon as he was satisfied that the foundations were taken care of, Professor March went on sabbatical, and those who claimed to know — i.e., Eliot — put the odds of his ever coming back at approximately zero.

Sometimes Quentin wished he could run away, too. He thought he would be shunned for the little joke he’d played on March with the podium, but the strange thing was that nobody said anything about it. He almost wished they would. He didn’t know whether he’d committed the perfect crime or a crime so public and unspeakable that nobody could bring themselves to confront him about it in broad daylight. He was trapped: he couldn’t grieve properly for Amanda because he felt like he’d killed her, and he couldn’t atone for killing her because he couldn’t confess, not even to Alice. He didn’t know how. So instead he kept his little particle of shame and filth inside, where it could fester and turn septic.

This was the kind of disaster Quentin thought he’d left behind the day he walked into that garden in Brooklyn. Things like this didn’t happen in Fillory: there was conflict, and even violence, but it was always heroic and ennobling, and anybody really good and important who bought it along the way came back to life at the end of the book. Now there was a rip in the corner of his perfect world, and fear and sadness were pouring in like freezing filthy water through a busted dam. Brakebills felt less like a secret garden and more like a fortified encampment. He wasn’t in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad, bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren’t their fault.

A week after the incident Amanda Orloff’s parents came to collect her things. No special fuss was made over them, at their request, but Quentin happened by one afternoon while they were saying goodbye to the Dean. All of Amanda’s belongings fit into one trunk and one pathetically small paisley-fabric suitcase.

Quentin’s heart seized up as he watched them. He was sure they could see his guilt; he felt like he was covered in it, sticky with it. But they ignored him. Mr. and Mrs. Orloff looked more like siblings than husband and wife: both six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with dishwater hair, his high and tight, hers in a businesslike shag. They seemed to be walking in a daze — Dean Fogg was guiding them by the elbows around something Quentin couldn’t see — and it took him a minute to figure out that they were heavily enchanted, so that even now they wouldn’t understand the nature of the school that their daughter had attended.

That August the Physical Kids straggled back from summer vacation early. They spent the week before classes camping out in the Cottage, playing pool and not studying and making a project out of drinking their way jigger by jigger through an old and viscous and thoroughly disgusting decanter of port Eliot had found at the back of a cabinet in the kitchen. But the mood was sober and subdued. Incredibly, Quentin was now a Fourth Year at Brakebills.

“We have to have a welters team,” Janet announced one day.

“No,” Eliot said, “we don’t.”

He lay with one arm over his face on an old leather couch. They were in the library in the Cottage, exhausted from having done nothing all day.

“Yes, actually we do, Eliot.” She nudged him sharply in the ribs with her foot. “Bigby told me. There’s a tournament. Everybody has to play. They just haven’t announced it yet.”

“Shit,” Eliot, Alice, Josh, and Quentin all said in unison.

“I call equipment manager,” Alice added.

“Why?” Josh moaned. “Why are they doing this to us? Why, God? ”

“It’s for morale,” Janet said. “Fogg says our spirits need elevating after last year. Organized welters is part of a ‘return to normalcy.’ ”

“My morale was fine until a minute ago. Fuck, I can’t stand that game. It’s a perversion of good magic. A perversion, I say!” Josh waved a finger at nobody in particular.

“Too bad, it’s compulsory. And it’s by Discipline, so we’re a team. Even Quentin”—she patted his head—“who still doesn’t have one.”

“Thanks for that.”

“I vote Janet captain,” Eliot said.

“Of course I’m captain. And as captain it is my happy duty to inform you that your first practice is in fifteen minutes.”

Everybody groaned and stirred and then settled themselves more comfortably where they were.

“Janet?” Josh said. “Stop doing this.”

“I’ve never even played,” Alice said. “I don’t know the rules.”

She lay on the rug paging limply through an old atlas. It was full of ancient maps in which the seas were populated with lovingly engraved marginal monsters, though in these maps the proportions were inverted, and the monsters were far larger and more numerous than the continents. Alice had acquired a pair of uncharacteristically hip rectangular glasses over the summer.

“Oh, you’ll pick it right up,” Eliot said. “Welters is fun — and educational!”

“Don’t worry.” Janet leaned down and gave the back of Alice’s head a maternal kiss. “Nobody really knows the rules.”

“Except Janet,” Josh said.

“Except me. I’ll see you all there at three.”

She flounced happily out of the room.

In the end it came down to the fact that none of them had anything better to do, which Janet had clearly been counting on. They reassembled by the welters board looking bedraggled and unpromising in the baking summer heat. It was so bright out you could barely stand to look at the grass. Eliot clutched the sticky decanter of port, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up. Just seeing it made Quentin feel dehydrated. Blue summer sky blazed in the water squares. A grasshopper collided with Quentin’s pants and clung there.

“So,” Janet said, climbing the ladder to the weather-beaten wooden judge’s chair in her perilously short skirt. “Who knows how we start?”

Starting, it emerged, involved picking a square and throwing a stone called the globe onto it. The stone was rough marble, bluish in color — it did look a little like a globe — and about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, though it was weirdly heavy. Quentin turned out to be unexpectedly talented at this feat, which was performed at various times during the game. The real trick was to avoid plunking it into a water square, in which case the game was forfeit, plus it was a pain to fish the globe out of the water.

Alice and Eliot were on the same team, facing off against Josh and Quentin, with Janet refereeing. Janet wasn’t the most assiduous student of the Physical Kids — that was Alice — or the most naturally gifted — Eliot — but she was ferally competitive, and she’d decided to acquire a total command of the technical intricacies of welters, which really was an amazingly complicated game.

“Without me you people would be lost!” Janet said, and it was true.

The game was half strategy, half spell-casting. You captured squares with magic, or protected them, or recaptured them by superseding an earlier spell. Water squares were the easiest, metal the hardest — they were reserved for summonings and other exotic enchantments. Eventually a player was supposed to step bodily onto the board, becoming in effect a playing piece in his or her own game, and as such vulnerable to direct, personal attacks. As he approached the edge the meadow around Quentin seemed to shrink, and the board expanded, as if it were at the center of a fisheye lens. The trees lost some of their color, becoming dim and silvery.

Things went quickly in the early rounds as both sides captured uncontested squares in a free-for-all land grab. As in chess, there were any number of conventional openings that had been worked out and optimized long ago. But once all the free squares were gone they had to start slugging it out head to head. The afternoon wore on, with long breaks for Janet’s highly technical welters tutorials. Eliot disappeared for twenty minutes and came back with six slender bottles of a very dry Finger Lakes Riesling he’d apparently been saving for just such an emergency, in two tin buckets full of melting ice. He hadn’t thought to bring any glasses, so they swigged straight from the bottles.

Quentin still didn’t have much of a capacity for alcohol, and the more wine he drank the less he could focus on the details of the game, which were getting hellishly complex. Apparently it was legal to transmute squares from one kind to another, and even make them slide around and switch places on the board somehow. By the time the players themselves had stepped onto the board, everybody was so drunk and confused that Janet had to tell them where to stand, which she did with towering condescension.

Not that anybody really cared. The sun drifted down behind the trees, dappling the grass with shadows, and the blue of the sky deepened to a luminous aqua. The air was bathwater warm. Josh fell asleep on the square he was supposed to be defending and sprawled across a whole row. Eliot did his impression of Janet, and Janet pretended to get mad. Alice took off her shoes and dabbled her feet in a temporarily uncontested water square. Their voices drifted up and got lost in the summer leaves. The wine was almost gone, the empty bottles bobbing around in the tin buckets, which were now full of lukewarm water in which a wasp had drowned.

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn’t. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so full of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind it a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again. Fogg’s idiotic welters plan had actually worked. The gray gloom the Beast had cast over the school was retreating. It was all right for them to be teenagers again, at least for a little longer. He felt forgiven, though he didn’t even know by whom.

Quentin imagined how they would all look from above. If somebody were to gaze down on them from a low-flying airplane, or a wandering dirigible, five people strewn around the neat little welters board on the grounds of their secret, exclusive magical enclave, their voices soft and unintelligible from a distance, how contented and complete in themselves that observer would believe them all to be. And it was actually true. The observer would be right. It was all real.

“Without me,” Janet said again, with fierce glee, blotting tears of laughter with the heel of her hand, “you people would be lost.”

If welters restored some of Quentin’s lost equilibrium, it presented a whole new kind of problem for Josh. They kept on practicing through the first month of the semester, and Quentin gradually got the hang of the game. It wasn’t really about knowing the spells, or the strategy, though you did have to know them. It was more about getting spells off perfectly when you had to — it was about that sense of power that lived somewhere in your chest, that made a spell strong and vital. Whatever it was, you had to be able to find it when you needed it.

Josh never knew what he would find. At one practice Quentin watched him go up against Eliot over one of the two metal squares on the board. These were made of a tarnished silvery stuff — one actually was silver, the other was palladium, whatever that was — with fine swirling lines and tiny italic words etched into them.

Eliot had chosen a fairly basic enchantment that created a small, softly glowing orb. Josh attempted a counterspell, muttering it half-heartedly while sketching a few cursory gestures with his large fingers. He always looked embarrassed when he cast spells, as if he never believed they were actually going to work.

But as he finished, the day went slightly faded and sepia toned, the way it might if a cloud drifted in front of the sun, or in the first moments of an eclipse.

“What the hell…?” Janet said, squinting up at the sky.

Josh had successfully defended the square — he’d abolished Eliot’s will-o’-the-wisp — but he’d gone too far. Somehow he’d created its inverse, a black hole: he’d punched a drain hole in the afternoon, and the daylight was swirling into it. The five Physical Kids gathered around in the amber light to look, as if it were some unusual and possibly venomous beetle. Quentin had never seen anything quite like it. It was like some heavy-duty appliance had been turned on somewhere, sucking up the energy needed to light the world and causing a local brown-out.

Josh was the only one who didn’t seem bothered by this.

“How you like me now?” He did a victorious-chicken dance. “Huh? How do you like Josh now!”

“Wow,” Quentin said. He backed away a step. “Josh, what is that thing?”

“I don’t know, I just waved my little fingers—” He waggled his fingers in Eliot’s face. A soft breeze was kicking up.

“Okay, Josh,” Eliot said. “You got me. Shut it down.”

“Had enough? Is it too real for you, magic man?”

“Seriously, Josh,” Alice said. “Please get rid of that thing, it’s creeping us out.”

By now the whole field was plunged in deep twilight, even though it was only two in the afternoon. Quentin couldn’t look directly at the space above the metal square, but the air around it looked wavy and distorted, the grass behind it distant and smeared. Underneath it, in a perfect circle that could have been ruled by a compass, the blades of grass were standing up perfectly straight, like splinters of green glass. The vortex drifted lazily to one side, toward the edge of the board, and a nearby oak tree leaned toward it with a monstrous creaking sound.

“Josh, don’t be an idiot,” Eliot snapped. Josh had stopped celebrating. He watched his creation nervously.

The tree groaned and listed ominously. Roots popped underground like muffled rifle shots.

“Josh! Josh!” Janet shouted.

“All right already! All right!” Josh scrubbed out the spell, and the hole in space vanished.

He looked pale but regretful, resentful: they’d pissed on his parade. They stood silent in a half circle around the half-toppled oak. One of its longest branches almost touched the ground.

Dean Fogg arranged an entire tournament schedule of weekend welters matches, culminating in a school championship at the end of the semester. To their surprise the Physical Kids tended to win their games. They even beat the snobby, standoffish Psychic group, who made up for any shortfalls in their spellcasting ability with their uncannily prescient strategic instincts. Their run of success continued through October. Their only real rivals were the Natural Magic group, who in spite of their pacifist, sylvan ethos were annoyingly hyper-competitive about welters.

Bit by bit the summer atmosphere of balmy congeniality evaporated as the afternoons got colder and shorter and the demands of the game started to conflict with their already crushing academic workload. After a while welters became a chore just like anything else, except even more meaningless. As Quentin and the other Physical Kids became less enthusiastic, Janet got shriller and pushier about the game, and her shrill pushiness became less endearing. She couldn’t help it, it was just her neurotic need to control everything coming out to play, but that didn’t make it any less of a pain in the ass for the rest of them. Theoretically they could have gotten out of it by tanking a match — it would only have taken one — but they didn’t. Nobody quite had the heart, or the guts.

But Josh’s inconsistency continued to be a problem. On the morning of the final game of the season, he didn’t show up at all.

It was a Saturday morning in early November, and they were playing for the school championship — what Fogg had grandly christened the Brakebills Cup, although so far he hadn’t produced any actual physical vessel that answered to that name. The grass around the welters field was tricked out with two ranks of grimly festive wooden bleachers that looked like something out of old newsreel footage of college sporting events, and which had probably been lying disassembled in numbered sections in some unimaginably dusty storeroom for decades. There was even a VIP box occupied by Dean Fogg and Professor Van der Weghe, who clutched a coffee cup in her pink-mittened hands.

The sky was gray, and a heavy wind made the leaves seethe in the trees. The gonfalons (in Brakebills blue and brown) strung along the backs of the bleachers fluttered and snapped. The grass was crunchy with frozen dew.

“Where the hell is he?” Quentin jogged in place to keep warm.

“I don’t know!” Janet had her arms around Eliot’s neck, clinging to him for warmth, which Eliot put up with irritably.

“Fuck him, let’s start,” he said. “I want to get this over with.”

“We can’t without Josh,” Alice said firmly.

“Who says we can’t?” Eliot tried to dislodge Janet, who clung to him relentlessly. “We’re better off without him anyway.”

“I’d rather lose with him,” Alice said, “than win without him. Anyway, he’s not dead. I saw him just after breakfast.”

“If he doesn’t show up soon, we’re all going to die of exposure. He’ll be the only one left alive to carry on our glorious fight.”

Josh’s absence made Quentin worried, about what he didn’t know.

“I’ll go find him,” Quentin said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s probably—”

At that moment the officiating faculty member, a hale, brick-colored man named Professor Foxtree, strode up to them wrapped in an ankle-length down parka. Students respected him instinctively because of his easy good humor and because he was tall and Native American.

“What’s the holdup?”

“We’re short a player, sir,” Janet told him. “Josh Hoberman is MIA.”

“So?” Professor Foxtree hugged himself vigorously. His long hooked nose had a drop on the end of it. “Let’s get this shit-show on the road, I’d like to be back in the senior common room by lunchtime. How many do you have?”

“Four, sir.”

“It’ll have to do.”

“Three, actually,” Quentin said. “Sorry, sir, but I have to find Josh. He should be here.”

He didn’t wait for an answer but set off back toward the House at a jog, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up around his ears to block out the cold.

“Come on, Q!” he heard Janet say. And then, disgustedly, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back: “Shit.”

Quentin didn’t know whether to be pissed off at Josh or worried about him, so he was both. Foxtree was right: it wasn’t like the game actually mattered. Maybe the bastard just overslept, he thought as he half-ran over the hard, frosted turf of the Sea. At least he had his fat to keep him warm. The fat bastard.

But Josh wasn’t in his bed. His room was a maelstrom of books and paper and laundry, as usual, some of it floating loosely in midair. Quentin walked down to the sunroom, but its only occupant was the aged Professor Brzezinski, the potions expert, who sat at the window, eyes closed, drenched in sun, his white beard flowing down over a stained old apron. An enormous fly bounced against one of the windowpanes. He looked asleep, but when Quentin was almost out the door he spoke.

“Looking for someone?”

Quentin stopped. “Yes, sir. Josh Hoberman. He’s late for welters.”

“Hoberman. The fat one.”

The old man waved Quentin over with a blue-veined hand and fumbled a colored pencil and a piece of lined paper out of the pocket of his apron. With sure, rapid strokes Professor Brzezinski sketched a rough outline of the Brakebills campus. He muttered a few words in French and made a sign over it with one hand like a compass rose.

He held it up.

“What does this tell you?”

Quentin had expected magical special effects of some kind, but there was nothing. A corner of the map was stained from a coffee spill on the tray.

“Not a lot, sir.”

“Really?” The old man studied the paper for himself, looking puzzled. He smelled like ozone, shattered air, as if he had recently been struck by lightning. “But this really is a very good locator spell. Look again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s right. And where on campus does even a very good locator spell not work?”

“I have no idea.” Admitting ignorance promptly was the fastest way to get information out of a Brakebills professor.

“Try the library.” Professor Brzezinski closed his eyes again, like an old walrus settling back down onto a sunny rock. “There are so many old seek-and-finds on that room, you can’t find a Goddamned thing.”

Quentin had spent very little time in the Brakebills library. Hardly anybody did if they could help it. Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

So the library was mostly empty, and it wasn’t hard to spot Josh in an alcove off the second floor, sitting at a small square table across from a tall, cadaverously thin man with chiseled cheekbones and a pencil mustache. The man wore a black suit that hung on him. He looked like an undertaker.

Quentin recognized the thin man: he was the magical bric-a-brac dealer who turned up once or twice a year at Brakebills in his woodie station wagon, loaded down with a bizarre collection of charms and fetishes and relics. Nobody particularly liked him, but the students tolerated him, if only because he was unintentionally funny and annoyed the faculty, who were always on the verge of banning him permanently. He wasn’t a magician himself and couldn’t tell the difference between what was genuine and what was junk, but he took himself and his stock extremely seriously. His name was Lovelady.

He’d turned up again shortly after the incident with the Beast, and some of the younger kids bought charms to protect themselves in the event of another attack. But Josh knew better than that. Or Quentin would have thought so.

“Hey,” Quentin said, but as he started toward them he knocked his forehead against a hard invisible barrier.

Whatever it was was cool and squeaked like clean glass. It was soundproof, too: he could see their lips moving, but the alcove was silent.

He caught Josh’s eye. There was a quick exchange with Lovelady, who peered over his shoulder at Quentin. Lovelady didn’t look happy, but he picked up what looked like an ordinary glass tumbler that had been standing upside-down on the table and flipped it over. The barrier vanished.

“Hey,” Josh said sullenly. “What’s up?” His eyes were red, and the bags under them were dark and bruised-looking. He didn’t look especially happy to see Quentin either.

“What’s going on?” Quentin ignored Lovelady. “You know we have a match this morning, right?”

“Oh, man. Right. Game time.” Josh smeared his right eye blearily with the heel of his hand. Lovelady watched them both, carefully husbanding his dignity. “How long do we have?”

“About negative half an hour.”

“Oh, man,” he said again. Josh put his forehead down on the table, then looked up suddenly at Lovelady. “Got anything for time travel? Time-turner or something?”

“Not at this time,” Lovelady intoned gravely. “But I will make inquiries.”

“Awesome.” Josh stood up. He saluted smartly. “Send me an owl.”

“Come on, they’re waiting for us. Fogg is freezing his ass off.”

“Good for him. Too much ass on that man anyway.”

Quentin got Josh out of the library and heading toward the rear of the House, though he was moving slowly and with a worrying tendency to lurch into door frames and occasionally into Quentin.

He did an abrupt about-face.

“Hang on,” he said. “Gotta get my quidditch costume. I mean uniform. I mean welters.”

“We don’t have uniforms.”

“I know that,” Josh snapped. “I’m drunk, I’m not delusional. I still need my winter coat.”

“Jesus, man. It’s not even ten o’clock.” Quentin couldn’t believe he’d been worried. This was the big mystery?

“Experiment. Thought it might relax me for the big game.”

“Yeah?” Quentin said. “Really? How’s that working out for you?”

“It was just a little Scotch, for Christ’s sake. My parents sent me a bottle of Lagavulin for my birthday. Eliot’s the lush around here, not me.” Josh looked up at him with his crafty, stubbly monk’s face. “Relax, I know what I can handle.”

“Yeah, you’re handling the hell out of it.”

“Oh, who gives a shit!” Josh was turning nasty. If Quentin was going to get mad, he would get madder. “You were probably hoping I wouldn’t show up and blow your precious game for you. I just wish you had the balls to admit it. God, you should hear Eliot do you behind your back. You’re as much of a cheerleader as Janet is. At least she has the tits for it.”

“If I wanted to win,” Quentin said coldly, “I would have left you in the library. Everybody else wanted to.”

He waited in the doorway, furious, arms folded, while Josh rifled through his clothes. He snatched his coat off the back of a desk chair, causing the chair to fall over. He let it lie there. Quentin wondered if it was true about Eliot. If Josh was trying to hurt him, he certainly knew where to stick the knife in.

They set off down the hall together in silence.

“All right,” Josh said finally. He sighed. “Look, you know how I’m kind of a fuck-up, right?”

Quentin said nothing, stone-faced. He didn’t feel like playing into Josh’s personal drama right now.

“Well, I am. And don’t bother with the self-esteem lecture, it’s gone so far beyond what you even want to know about. I’ve always been a smart guy, but I’m a low-grades/high-test-scores kind of smart guy. If it wasn’t for Fogg they would have kicked me out after last semester.”

“All right.”

“Look, all the rest of you can go around playing Peter Perfect, and that’s fine, but I have to work my ass off just to stay here! If you saw my grades — you guys don’t even know the alphabet goes that high.”

“We all have to work at it,” Quentin said a little defensively. “Well, except Eliot.”

“Yeah, okay, fine. But it’s fun for you. You get off on it. That’s your thing.” Josh shouldered his way through the French doors, out into the late-autumn morning, shrugging his way into his heavy overcoat at the same time. “Fuck, it’s cold. Look, I love it here, but I’m not going to make it on my own. I just don’t know where it comes from.”

With no warning he grabbed the front of Quentin’s coat and pushed him up against the wall of the House.

“Don’t you get it? I don’t know where it comes from! I do a spell, I don’t know if it’s going work or not!” His normally soft, placid face had worked itself into a mask of anger. “You look for the power, and it’s just there! Me, I never know! I never know if it’s going to be there when I need it. It comes and it goes and I don’t even know why!”

“Okay, okay.” Quentin put his hands on Josh’s shoulders, trying to calm him down. “Jesus. You’re hurting my man-boobs.”

Josh let go of him and stalked off in the direction of the Maze. Quentin caught up with him.

“So you thought Lovelady could help.”

“I thought he could… I don’t know.” Josh shrugged helplessly. “Give me a little boost. Just make it so I could count on it a little more.”

“By selling you some trash he got off eBay.”

“You know, he has interesting connections.” Just like that Josh was finding his good humor again. He always did. “They act all superior when we’re watching, but some of the faculty buy from Lovelady. I heard a couple of years ago Van der Weghe bought an old brass door knocker off him that turned out to be a Hand of Oberon. Chambers uses it to cut down trees around the Sea.

“I thought he could sell me a charm. Something to bring my grades up. I know I act like I don’t care, but I want to stay here, Quentin! I don’t want to go back out there!”

He pointed off in the general direction of the outside world. The grass was wet and half frozen, and the Sea was misty.

“I want you to stay, too,” Quentin said. His anger was going, too. “But Lovelady — Jesus, maybe you are an idiot. Why didn’t you just go to Eliot for help?”

“Eliot. He’s the last guy I’d talk to. Don’t you see how he looks at me in class? A guy like that — okay, he’s had it tough, in lots of ways, but this isn’t the kind of thing he understands.”

“What did Lovelady try to sell you?

“Bunch of old dust bunnies. Bastard told me they were Aleister Crow ley’s ashes.”

“What were you going to do with them anyway? Snort them?”

They pushed their way through the scrim of trees around the field. It was a grim scene. Eliot and Janet were huddled at one end of the board looking bedraggled and thoroughly chilled. Poor Alice was out on the board, squatting on a stone square and hugging herself miserably. The Natural Magic group was at the other end; despite the Physical Kids’ shortfall, they had chosen to field the full five players. Not very sportsmanlike. It was hard to see their faces — in an effort to intimidate their opponents they wore hooded druid robes that somebody had sewn together out of a bunch of green velvet curtains. They weren’t made to get wet.

The Physical Kids gave a ragged cheer when Josh and Quentin appeared.

“My heroes,” Janet said sarcastically. “Where did you find him?”

“Somewhere warm and dry,” Josh said.

They were being beaten badly, but Josh’s surprise reappearance revived their fighting spirit. On his first turn Josh went for the silver square, and after five solid minutes of Gregorianesque chanting he improbably brought into being a fiery elemental — a slow-moving, woodchuck-size salamander that looked like it was constructed out of glowing orange embers, and which went on to laconically capture two adjacent squares for good measure. It then settled down on its six legs to smolder and watch the rest of the match, raindrops sizzling and skating off its charred scales.

The Physical Kids’ comeback had the unfortunate effect of lengthening the game beyond all possibility of enjoyment. It was the longest game they’d played all season; it was shaping up to be the longest welters game anybody could remember. Finally after another hour the handsome, Scandinavian-looking captain of the Natural team — whom Quentin was pretty sure Janet used to date — toed the edge of the sand square he stood on, gathered his wet velvet robe around him regally, and caused an elegantly twisted little olive tree to curl up out of a grass square in the Physicals’ home row.

“Suck it!” he said.

“That’s the win,” Professor Foxtree called from the judge’s chair. He was visibly catatonic from boredom. “Unless you Physicals can match it. If not, then this damn game is finally over. Somebody throw the globe.”

“Come on, Q,” Eliot said. “My fingernails are blue. My lips are probably blue.”

“Your balls are probably blue,” Quentin said. He picked up the heavy marble from where it rested in a stone bowl by the edge of the board.

He looked around at the strange scene he stood at the center of. They were still in it — they’d been down, but they’d come almost all the way back, and he hardly ever missed with the globe. Mercifully there was no wind, but a mist was gathering, and it was getting hard to see the far end of the board. The afternoon was silent except for the dripping of the trees.

“Quentin!” a boy’s voice called hoarsely from the bleachers. “Quen-tin! ”

The Dean was still up in the VIP box, gamely miming enthusiasm. He blew his nose loudly into a silk handkerchief. The sun was a distant memory.

All at once a pleasant feeling of lightness and warmth came over Quentin — it was so vivid, and so divorced from the freezing cold reality all around him, that he wondered if somebody was doing some surreptitious magic on him; he looked suspiciously at the smoldering salamander, but it loftily ignored him. There was the familiar sense of the world narrowing to the limits of the board, trees and people shrinking and curving away around it, becoming silvery, solarized. Quentin’s view took in the miserable Josh, pacing by the edge of the board and taking deep breaths, and Janet, who was clenching her jaw and jutting it at him fiercely, hungrily, her arm through Eliot’s, whose eyes were fixed on some invisible scenery in the middle distance.

It all felt very far away. None of it mattered. That was the funny thing — it was incredible that he hadn’t seen it before. He would have to try and explain this to Josh. He had done a terrible, stupid thing in the classroom, the day Amanda Orloff had died, and he would never get over it, but he’d figured out how to live with it. You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn’t, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn’t. Put it in perspective. Something like that. Or otherwise what was the point? He didn’t know if he could explain it to Josh. But maybe he could show him.

Quentin took off his coat, as if he were sloughing off a scratchy, too-small skin. He rolled his shoulders in the cold air; he knew it would be freezing in a minute, but for the moment it was just refreshing. He sighted on the blond Natural player in his idiotic robe, leaned to one side, and slung the globe sidearm at his knee. It hit the heavy velvet with an audible thump.

“Ow!” The Natural grabbed his knee and looked up at Quentin with an outraged expression. That would bruise. “Foul!”

“Suck it,” Quentin said.

He whipped his shirt off over his head. Ignoring the rising yelps of dismay on all sides — it was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you — he walked over to where Alice stood, dumbstruck, on her square. He would probably regret this later, but God it was good to be a magician sometimes. He hoisted her over his shoulder fireman-style and jumped with her into the freezing, cleansing water.

MARIE BYRD LAND

Quentin had been wondering about the mystery of the Fourth Year ever since he got to Brakebills. Everybody did. The basic facts were common knowledge: every year in September half the Fourth Years swiftly and silently disappeared from the House overnight. No one discussed their absence. The vanished Fourth Years reappeared at the end of December looking thin and drawn and generally chewed over, to no particular comment — it was considered fatally bad form to say anything about it. They quietly mixed back into the general Brakebills population, and that was that. The rest of the Fourth Years vanished in January and came back at the end of April.

Now the first semester of Quentin’s Fourth Year was almost over, and he had acquired not one single new piece of information about what happened during that interval. The secret of where they went and what they did there, or what was done to them, was improbably well kept. Even students who took nothing else at Brakebills seriously were passionately serious on that one point: “Dude, I’m not even kidding, you so don’t want to be asking me about that…”

The disaster of the Beast had thrown off the previous year’s schedule. The regular contingent of Fourth Years had departed for the first semester — they were gone when it happened — but the second-semester group, which included Eliot, Janet, and Josh, had finished out the year at Brakebills as usual. To the extent that they speculated about it, they called themselves “the Spared.” Apparently whatever the faculty had in store for them was nasty enough as it was without the added threat of assault by an interdimensional carnivore.

But now it was back to business as usual. This year half the Fourth Years departed on schedule, along with a handful of the Fifth Years: the ten Spared had been split up between the two semesters, five and five. Whether by accident or by design, the Physical Kids would all be shipping out together in January.

It was a regular topic of conversation around the battered billiard table in the Cottage.

“You know what I bet?” Josh said, one Sunday afternoon in December. They were treating hangovers with glasses of Coke and huge quantities of bacon. “I bet they make us go to normal college. Just some random state school where we have to read Cannery Row and debate the Stamp Act. And like the second day Eliot’s going to be crying in the bathroom and begging for his foie gras and his malbec while some jock sodomizes him with a lacrosse stick.”

“Um, did that just turn into your total gay fantasy halfway through?” Janet asked.

“I have it on good authority”—Eliot attempted to jump the cue ball over the 8 and failed completely, pocketing both, which seemed not to bother him at all—“on the best of authority, that the whole Fourth Year enigma is a front. It’s all a hoax to scare off the faint of heart. You spend the whole semester on Fogg’s private island in the Maldives, contemplating the infinities of the multiverse in grains of fine white beach sand while coolies bring you rum-and-tonics.”

“I don’t think they have ‘coolies’ in the Maldives,” Alice said quietly. “It’s been an independent republic since 1965.”

“So how come everybody comes back all skinny?” Quentin asked. Janet and Eliot were playing, the rest of them lay on two beat-up Victorian couches. The room was small enough that they occasionally had to lean to one side to avoid the butt end of a cue.

“That’s from all the skinny-dipping.”

“Hork hork hork,” said Janet.

“Quentin should be good at that,” Josh added.

“Your fat ass could use some skinny-dipping.”

“I don’t want to go,” Alice said. “Can’t I get a doctor’s note or something? Like when they let the Christian kids out of sex ed? Isn’t anybody else worried?”

“Oh, I’m terrified.” If he was joking, Eliot gave no sign of it. He handed Janet the cue ball. It was decorated with trompe-l’oeil lunar craters to look like the moon. “I’m not strong like the rest of you. I’m weak. I’m a delicate flower.”

“Don’t worry, delicate flower,” Janet said. She made her shot without dropping her gaze, no-look. “Suffering will make you strong.”

They came for Quentin one night in January.

He knew it would happen at night — it was always at breakfast that they noticed that the Fourth Years were gone. It must have been two or three in the morning, but he woke up instantly when Professor Van der Weghe knocked on his door. He knew what was going on. The sound of her husky European voice in the darkness reminded him of his first night at Brakebills, when she’d put him to bed after his Examination.

“It’s time, Quentin,” she called. “We are going up to the roof. Do not bring anything.”

He stepped into his slippers. Outside a file of silent, rumpled Brakebills students stood on the stairs.

Nobody spoke as Professor Van der Weghe led them through a door in a stretch of wall that Quentin could have sworn had been blank the day before, between a pair of ten-foot-high oil paintings of clipper ships foundering in heavy seas. They shuffled up the dark wooden stairs without speaking, fifteen of them — ten Fourth Years, five leftover Fifth Years — everyone wearing identical navy blue Brakebills-issue pajamas. Despite Van der Weghe’s orders, Gretchen sullenly gripped a worn black teddy bear along with her cane. Up ahead of them Professor Van der Weghe banged open a wooden trapdoor, and they filed out onto the roof.

It was an awkward perch, a long, narrow, windy strip with a shingled drop falling away steeply on either side. A low wrought-iron fence ran along the edge, providing absolutely no protection or reassurance whatsoever; in fact it was the perfect height to take you out at the knees if you accidentally backed into it. The night was bitingly cold, with a lively cross-breeze. The sky was lightly frosted with high, wind-whisked clouds luridly backlit by a gibbous moon.

Quentin hugged himself. Still nobody had said a word; no one even looked at anybody else. It was like they were all still half asleep, and a single word would have shattered the delicate dream in which they walked. Even the other Physical Kids were like strangers.

“Everyone take off your pajamas,” Professor Van der Weghe called out.

Weirdly, they did. Everything was so surreal and trancelike already that it made perfect sense that they would all, guys and girls alike, get naked in front of each other in the freezing cold without a hint of self-consciousness. Afterward Quentin even remembered Alice putting a warm hand on his bare shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of her pajama bottoms. Soon they were naked and shivering, their bare backs and buttocks pale in the moonlight, the starlit campus rolling away far below them, with the dark trees of the forest beyond.

Some of the students clutched their pajamas in both hands, but Professor Van der Weghe instructed them to drop them in a heap at their feet. Quentin’s blew away and disappeared over the ledge, but he didn’t try to stop them. It didn’t matter. She moved down the line, dabbing a generous gob of chalky white paste on each forehead and both shoulders with her thumb as she passed. When she was done, she walked back the other way, lining them up, checking her work, making sure they were standing up straight. Finally she called out a single harsh syllable.

Instantly a huge soft weight pressed down on Quentin, settling on his shoulders, bending him forward. He crouched down, straining against it. He tried to fight it, to lift it. It was crushing him! He bit back panic. It flashed through his brain — the Beast was back! — but this was different. As he doubled over he felt his knees folding up into his belly, merging with it. Why wasn’t Professor Van der Weghe helping them? Quentin’s neck was stretching and stretching out and forward, out of his control. It was grotesque, a horrible dream. He wanted to vomit but couldn’t. His toes were melting and flowing together, his fingers were elongating enormously and spreading out, and something soft and warm was bursting out of his arms and chest, covering him completely. His lips pouted grotesquely and hardened. The narrow strip of roof rose up to meet him.

And then the weight was gone. He squatted on the gray slate roof, breathing hard. At least he didn’t feel cold anymore. He looked at Alice, and Alice looked back at him. But it wasn’t Alice anymore. She had become a large gray goose, and so had he.

Professor Van der Weghe moved down the line again. With both hands she picked up each student in turn and threw him or her bodily off the roof. They all, in spite of the shock or because of it, reflexively spread out their wings and caught the air before they could be snared by the bare, grasping treetops below. One by one they sailed away into the night.

When it was his turn, Quentin honked in protest. Professor Van der Weghe’s human hands were hard and scary and burned against his feathers. He shat on her feet in panic. But then he was in the air and tumbling. He spread his wings and beat his way up into the sky, thrashing and punishing the air till it bore him up. It would have been impossible not to.

Quentin’s new goose-brain, it emerged, was not much given to reflection. His senses now tracked only a handful of key stimuli, but it tracked those very, very closely. This body was made for either sitting or flying, not much else, and as it happened Quentin was in a mood to fly. In fact, he felt like flying more than he had ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.

With no conscious thought or apparent effort, he and his classmates fell into the classic ragged V formation, with a Fourth Year named Georgia at the apex. Georgia was the daughter of the receptionist at a car dealership in Michigan, and she had come here against her family’s will — unlike Quentin, she had confessed fully the nature of Brakebills, and as a reward for her honesty Georgia’s parents had tried to have her committed. Thanks to Fogg’s subtle spellcraft Georgia’s parents believed her to be attending a vocational institute for troubled adults. Now Georgia, whose Discipline was an obscure branch of Healing roughly analogous to endocrinology, and who wore her wiry black hair cinched at the back with a tortoiseshell barrette, was leading them southward, her brand-new wings pumping vigorously.

It was just chance; any one of them could have led the flock. Quentin was vaguely aware that, although he’d lost the lion’s share of his cognitive capacity in the transformation, he’d also picked up a couple of new senses. One had to do with air: he could perceive wind speed and direction and air temperature as clearly as whorls of smoke in a wind tunnel. The sky now appeared to him as a three-dimensional map of currents and eddies, friendly rising heat plumes and dense dangerous sinks of cool air. He could feel the prickle of distant cumulus clouds swapping bursts of positive and negative electrical charge. Quentin’s sense of direction had sharpened, too, to the point where it felt like he had a finely engineered compass floating in oil, perfectly balanced, at the center of his brain.

He could feel invisible tracks and rails extending away from him through the air in all directions into the blue distance. They were the Earth’s lines of magnetic force, and it was along one of these rails that Georgia was leading them. She was taking them south. By dawn they were a mile up and doing sixty miles an hour, overtaking cars on the Hudson Parkway below them.

They passed New York City, a stony encrustation crackling with alien heat and electrical sparks and exuding toxic flatulence. They flew all day, following the coastline, past Trenton and Philadelphia, sometimes over sea, sometimes over frozen fields, surfing the temperature gradients, boosted by updrafts, transferring seamlessly from current to current as one petered out and the next one kicked in. It felt fantastic. Quentin couldn’t imagine stopping. He couldn’t believe how strong he was, how many wing beats he had stored up in his iron chest muscles. He just couldn’t contain himself. He had to talk about it.

“Honk!” he yelled. “Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk!”

His classmates agreed.

Quentin was shuffled up and down the V in an orderly fashion, in more or less the same way a volleyball team rotates serve. Sometimes they plonked down and rested and fed in a reservoir or a highway median or a badly drained spot on the lawn of a suburban office park (landscaping errors were pure gold to geese). Not infrequently they shared these priceless scraps of real estate with other V’s, real geese who, sensing their transformed nature, regarded them with polite amusement.

How long they flew, Quentin couldn’t have said. Once in a while he caught sight of a land formation he recognized, and he tried to calculate time and distance — if they flew at such and such a speed, and the Chesapeake Bay was so many miles south of New York City, then X number of days must have passed since… what again exactly? The X’s and blanks and other equationly such-and-such’s stubbornly refused to fill themselves in. They didn’t want to do their dance. Quentin’s goose-brain didn’t have the hardware to handle numbers, nor was it interested in whatever point those numbers were supposed to prove anyway.

They had gone far enough south now that the weather was perceptibly warmer, and then they went farther still. They went south over the Florida Keys, dry, crusty little nubbins barely poking their heads up out of the ceaselessly lapping turquoise, then out over the Caribbean, bypassing Cuba, farther south than any sensible goose had license to go. They overflew the Panama Canal, no doubt causing any bird-watchers who happened to spot them to shake their heads at the lost little V as they dutifully logged it in their bird journals.

Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew, or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. He forgot about his human past, about Brakebills and Brooklyn and James and Julia and Penny and Dean Fogg. Why hang on to them? He had no name anymore. He barely had any individual identity, and he didn’t want one. What good were such human artifacts? He was an animal. His job was to turn bugs and plants into muscle and fat and feathers and flight and miles logged. He served only his flock-fellows and the wind and the laws of Darwin. And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier.

Though it was tougher going now. They splashed down more rarely and in more exotic locales, widely spaced way stations that must have been picked out for them in advance. He’d be cruising along a mile and a half up, one eye monitoring the rocky ruff of the Andes, feeling his empty belly and the ache in his chest muscles, when something would twinkle in the forest a hundred miles down the line, and sure enough they’d happen upon a freshly flooded soccer field, or an abandoned swimming pool in some Shining Path warlord’s ruined villa, rainwater having diluted almost to nothing the lingering chemical tang of chlorine.

It was getting colder again, after their long tropical interlude. Peru gave way to Chile and the grassy, wind-ruffled Patagonian pampas. They were a lean flock now, their fat reserves depleted, but nobody turned aside or hesitated for a second as they plunged suicidally south from the tip of Cape Horn out over the terrifying blue chaos of Drake Passage. The invisible highway they rode would brook no swerving.

There was no playful intra-flock honking now. Quentin glanced over once at the other branch of the V to see Janet’s black button eye burning with furious determination opposite him. They overnighted on a miraculous barge adrift in deep water and loaded with good things, watercress and alfalfa and clover. When the bleak gray shore of Antarctica heaved up over the horizon, they regarded it not with relief but with collective resignation. This was no respite. There were no goose names for this country because geese didn’t come here, or if they did they never came back. He could see magnetic tracks and rails converging in the air here, carving in from far away on either side, like the longitude lines that come crowding together at the bottom of a globe. The Brakebills V flew high, the wrinkled gray swells telescopically clear below them through two miles of dry, salted air.

Instead of a beach a fringe of tumbled boulders crammed with bizarre, unintelligible penguins crept by, then blank white ice, the frozen skull of the Earth. Quentin was tired. The cold tore at his little body through its thin feathery jacket. He no longer knew what was keeping them aloft. If one of them dropped, he knew, they would all give up, just fold their wings and dive for the porcelain white snow, which would happily devour them.

And then the rail they followed dipped like a dowser’s rod. It angled them downward, and they slipped and slid gratefully down it, accepting a loss of altitude in exchange for speed and blessed relief from the effort of maintaining height with their burning wings. Quentin could see now that there was a stone house there in the snow, an anomaly in the otherwise featureless plain. It was a place of men, and ordinarily Quentin would have feared it, crapped on it, and then blown by it and forgotten it.

But no, there was no question, their track ended there. It buried itself in one of the stone house’s many snowy roofs. They were close enough now that Quentin could see a man standing on one of them, waiting for them, holding a long straight staff. The urge to fly from him was strong, but exhaustion and above all the magnetic logic of the track were stronger.

At the very last second he cupped his stiffened wings and they caught the air like a sail, snatching up the last of his kinetic energy and breaking his fall. He plopped onto the snow roof and lay there gasping at the thin atmosphere. His eyes went dull. The human hadn’t moved. Well, fuck him. He could do what he wanted with them, pluck them and gut them and stuff them and roast them, Quentin didn’t care anymore as long as he could just have one blessed moment of rest for his aching wings.

The man shaped a strange syllable with his fleshy, beakless lips and tapped the base of his staff on the roof. Fifteen pale, naked human teenagers lay in the snow under the white polar sun.

Quentin woke up in a bare white bedroom. He could not have guessed to the nearest twenty-four hours how long he’d been asleep. His chest and arms felt bruised and achy. He looked at his crude, pink, human hands, with their stubby featherless fingers. He brought them up to touch his face. He sighed and resigned himself to being a man again.

There was very little in the bedroom, and all of it was white: the bedclothes, the whitewashed walls, the coarse drawstring pajamas he wore, the white-painted iron bedstead, the slippers waiting for him on the cold stone floor. From the small square window Quentin could see he was on the second floor. His view was of broken snowfields beneath a white sky, stretching out to the horizon, a meaningless abstract white line an unjudgable distance away. My God. What had he gotten himself into?

Quentin shuffled out into the corridor, still in his pajamas and a thin robe he’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the door. He found his way downstairs into a quiet, airy hall with a timbered ceiling; it was identical to the dining hall at Brakebills, but the vibe was different, more like an Alpine ski lodge. A long table with benches ran most of the length of the hall.

Quentin sat down. A man sat alone at one end of the table, nursing a mug of coffee and staring bleakly at the picked-over remains of a lavish breakfast. He was sandy-haired, tall but round-shouldered, with a weak chin and the beginnings of a paunch. His dressing gown was much whiter and fluffier than Quentin’s. His eyes were a pale, watery green.

“I let you sleep,” he said. “Most of the others are already up.”

“Thanks.” Quentin scooched down the bench to sit across from him. He rummaged through the leftover plates and dishes for a clean fork.

“You are at Brakebills South.” The man’s voice was oddly flat, with a slight Russian accent, and he didn’t look directly at Quentin when he talked. “We are about five hundred miles from the South Pole. You flew in over the Bellingshausen Sea on your way in from Chile, over a region called Ellsworth Land. They call this part of Antarctica Marie Byrd Land. Admiral Byrd named it after his wife.”

He scratched his tousled hair unself-consciously.

“Where’s everybody else?” Quentin asked. There didn’t seem to be any point in being formal, since they were both wearing bathrobes. And the cold hash browns were unbelievably good. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

“I gave them the morning.” He waved in no particular direction. “Classes begin in the afternoon.”

Quentin nodded, his mouth full.

“What kind of classes?” he managed.

“What kind of classes,” the man repeated. “Here at Brakebills South you will begin your education in magic. Or I suppose you thought that was what you were doing with Professor Fogg?”

Questions like that always confused Quentin, so he resorted to honesty.

“Yes, I did think that.”

“You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think”—his accent made it theenk—“that you have been studying magic.” Medzhik. “You have practiced your Popper and memorized your conjugations and declensions and modifications. What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?”

It popped out automatically. “Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water.”

“Very good,” he said sarcastically. “Magnificent. You are a genius.”

With an effort Quentin decided not to be stung by this. He was still enjoying the Zen afterglow of having been a goose. And the hash browns.

“Thank you.”

“You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare. You recite it like you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But you do not understand it.”

“I don’t?”

“To become a magician you must do something very different,” the man said. This was clearly his set piece. “You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you.

“When a magician casts a spell, he does not first mentally review the Major, Minor, Tertiary, and Quaternary Circumstances. He does not search his soul to determine the phase of the moon, and the nearest body of water, and the last time he wiped his ass. When he wishes to cast a spell he simply casts it. When he wishes to fly, he simply flies. When he wants the dishes done, they simply are.”

The man muttered something, tapped once resonantly on the table, and the dishes began noisily arranging themselves into stacks as if they were magnetized.

“You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek.” He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake. “We are going to submerge the language of spellcasting deep into who you are, so that you have it always, wherever you are, whenever you need it. Not just when you have studied for a test.

“You are not going on a mystical adventure here, Quentin. This process will be long and painful and humiliating and very, very”—he practically shouted the word—“boring. It is a task best performed in silence and isolation. That is the reason for your presence here. You will not enjoy the time you spend at Brakebills South. I do not encourage you to try.”

Quentin listened to this in silence. He didn’t especially like this man, who had just referred to his penis and whose name he still didn’t know. He put it out of his mind and focused on cramming starch into his depleted body.

“So how do I do that?” Quentin mumbled. “Learn things in my bones? Or whatever?”

“It is very hard. Not everybody does. Not everybody can.”

“Uh-huh. What happens if I can’t?”

“Nothing. You go back to Brakebills. You graduate. You spend your life as a second-rate magician. Many do. Probably you never realize it. Even the fact that you failed is beyond your ability to comprehend.”

Quentin had no intention of letting that happen to him, though it occurred to him that probably nobody actually set out to have that happen to them, and, statistically speaking, it had to happen to somebody. The hash browns no longer tasted quite so scrumptious. He put his fork down.

“Fogg tells me you are good with your hands,” the sandy-haired man said, relenting a little. “Show me.”

Quentin’s fingers were still stiff and sore from having served as wings, but he picked up a sharp knife that looked decently balanced, carefully cleaned it off with a napkin, and held it between the last two fingers in his left hand. He spun it, finger by finger, as far as his thumb, then he tossed it up almost to the ceiling — still spinning, careful to let it pass between two rafters — with the idea that it would fall and bury itself in the table between the third and fourth fingers of his outstretched left hand. This was best done without looking, maintaining eye contact with his audience for maximum effect.

Quentin’s breakfast companion picked up a loaf of bread and stuck it out so that the falling knife speared it. He tossed loaf and knife contemptuously on the table.

“You take stupid risks,” the man said stonily. “Go on and join your friends. I think”—theenk—“you will find them on the roof of the West Tower.” He pointed to a doorway. “We begin in the afternoon.”

Okay, Mr. Funnylaffs, Quentin thought. You’re the boss.

He stood up. The stranger stood up, too, and shuffled off in another direction. He had the air of a disappointed man.

Stone for stone, board for board, Brakebills South was the same house as the House at Brakebills. Which was reassuring, in a way, but it was incongruous to find what looked like an eighteenth-century English country house planted in the middle of a soaring Antarctic wasteland. The roof of the West Tower was be broad and round and paved with smooth flagstones, with a stone wall running around the edge. It was open to the elements, but some kind of magical arrangement kept the air warm and humid and protected it from the wind, or mostly. Quentin imagined he could feel a deep chill lurking underneath the warmth somewhere. The air was tepid, but the floor, the furniture, everything he touched was cool and clammy. It was like being in a warm greenhouse in the dead of winter.

As promised, the rest of the Brakebills group was up there, standing around dazed in threes and fours, staring out at the snowpack and talking in low tones, bathed in the eerie, even Antarctic light. They looked different. Their waists were trimmer, and their shoulders and chests were sturdier, huskier. They’d lost fat and packed on muscle during their flight south. Their jaws and cheekbones were sharply defined. Alice looked lovely and gaunt and lost.

“Honk honk honkonk honk honk!” Janet said when she saw Quentin. People laughed, though Quentin had the impression she’d already made that joke a few times.

“Hey, man,” Josh said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Is this place fucked up or what?”

“Doesn’t seem so bad,” Quentin said. “What time is skinny-dipping?”

“I might have been a little off base with that,” Eliot said gloomily, also probably not for the first time. “We did all get naked, anyway.”

They were all wearing identical white pajamas. Quentin felt like an inmate in an insane asylum. He wondered if Eliot was missing his secret boyfriend of the moment, whoever it was.

“I ran into Nurse Ratched downstairs,” he said. The pajamas had no pockets, and Quentin kept looking for somewhere to put his hands. “He gave me a speech about how stupid I am and how miserable he’s going to make me.”

“You slept through our little meet’n’greet. That’s Professor Mayakovsky.”

“Mayakovsky. Like Dean Mayakovsky?”

“He’s the son,” Eliot said. “I always wondered what happened to him. Now we know.”

The original Mayakovsky had been the most powerful magician in a wave of international faculty brought in during the 1930s and 1940s. Until then Brakebills taught English and American magic almost exclusively, but in the 1930s a vogue for “multicultural” spellcasting had swept the school. Professors were imported at huge expense from around the world, the more remote the better: skirt-wearing shamans from Micronesian dot-islands; hunch-shouldered, hookah-puffing wizards from inner-city Cairo coffeehouses; blue-faced Tuareg necromancers from southern Morocco. Legend had it that Mayakovsky senior was recruited from a remote Siberian location, a cluster of frozen Soviet blockhouses where local shamanic traditions had hybridized with sophisticated Muscovite practices brought there by gulag inmates.

“I wonder how badly you have to fuck up to get this assignment,” Josh mused.

“Maybe he wanted it,” Quentin said. “Maybe he likes it here. Dude must be in creepy loner heaven.”

“I think you were right, I think I am going to be the first one to crack,” Eliot said, as if he were having a different conversation. He felt the fluffy stubble on his cheek. “I don’t like it here. This stuff is giving me a rash.” He fingered the material of the Brakebills South pajamas. “I think it might have a stain on it.”

Janet rubbed his arm comfortingly. “You’ll be okay. You survived Oregon. Is this worse than Oregon?”

“Maybe if I ask nicely he’ll turn me back into a goose.”

“Oh my God!” said Alice. “Never again. Do you realize we ate bugs? We ate bugs!”

“What do you mean, never again? How do you think we’re getting back?”

“You know what I liked about being a goose?” Josh said. “Being able to crap wherever I wanted.”

“I’m not going back.” Eliot threw a white pebble out into the white bleakness, where it became invisible before it hit the ground. “I could fly to Australia from here. Or New Zealand — the vineyards there are really coming along. Some nice sheep farmer will adopt me and feed me sauvignon blanc and turn my liver into a wonderful foie gras.”

“Maybe Professor Mayakovsky can turn you into a kiwi bird,” Josh said helpfully.

“Kiwi birds can’t fly.”

“Anyway, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s going to do us a lot of favors,” Alice said.

“He must spend a lot of time alone,” Quentin said. “I wonder if we should we feel bad for him.”

Janet snorted.

“Honk honk honk honk honk!”

There was no reliable way to measure time at Brakebills South. There were no clocks, and the sun was a dull white fluorescence permanently thumb-tacked half an inch above the white horizon. It made Quentin think of the Watcherwoman, how she was always trying to stop time. She would have loved this place.

That first morning they talked and mingled on the roof of the West Tower for what felt like hours, huddling together to cope with all the strangeness. Nobody felt like going back downstairs, even after they got tired of standing and ran out of things to talk about, so they all sat around the edge of the roof with their backs against the stone wall and just stared off into the pale, hazy distance, bathed in the weird, directionless, all-permeating white light reflecting off the snow.

Quentin leaned his back against the cool stone and closed his eyes. He felt Alice put her head on his shoulder. If nothing else, he could hang on to her. Whatever else changed, she was always the same. They rested.

Later, it might have been minutes or hours or days, he opened his eyes. He tried to say something and discovered that he couldn’t talk.

Some of the others were on their feet already. Professor Mayakovsky had appeared at the head of the stairs, his white bathrobe belted over his gut. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve taken the liberty of depriving you of the power of speech,” he said. He tapped his Adam’s apple. “There will be no talking at Brakebills South. It is the hardest thing to adjust to, and I find it eases the transition if I simply prevent you from speaking for your first weeks here. You may vocalize for the purposes of spellcasting, but for no other reason.”

The class stared at him mutely. Mayakovsky seemed to be more comfortable now that nobody could answer back.

“If you will all follow me downstairs, it is time for your first lesson.”

One thing had always confused Quentin about the magic he read about in books: it never seemed especially hard to do. There were lots of furrowed brows and thick books and long white beards and whatnot, but when it came right down to it, you memorized the incantation — or you just read it off the page, if that was too much trouble — you collected the herbs, waved the wand, rubbed the lamp, mixed the potion, said the words — and just like that the forces of the beyond did your bidding. It was like making salad dressing or driving stick or assembling Ikea furniture — just another skill you could learn. It took some time and effort, but compared to doing calculus, say, or playing the oboe — well, there really was no comparison. Any idiot could do magic.

Quentin had been perversely relieved when he learned that there was more to it than that. Talent was part of it — that silent, invisible exertion he felt in his chest every time a spell came out right. But there was also work, hard work, mountains of it. Every spell had to be adjusted and modified in a hundred ways according to the prevailing Circumstances — they adorned the word with a capital letter at Brakebills — under which it was cast. These Circumstances could be just about anything: magic was a complicated, fiddly instrument that had to be calibrated precisely to the context in which it operated. Quentin had committed to memory dozens of pages of closely printed charts and diagrams spelling out the Major Circumstances and how they affected any given enchantment. And then, once you had all that down, there were hundreds of Corollaries and Exceptions to memorize too.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary.

It was Mayakovsky’s intention to make them memorize all these minutiae, and not only to memorize them but to absorb and internalize them. The very best spellcasters had talent, he told his captive, silent audience, but they also had unusual under-the-hood mental machinery, the delicate but powerful correlating and cross-checking engines necessary to access and manipulate and manage this vast body of information.

That first afternoon Quentin expected a lecture, but instead, when Mayakovsky was done jinxing their larynxes, he showed each of them to what looked like a monk’s cell, a small stone room with a single high, barred window, a single chair, and a single square wooden table. A shelf of magical reference books was bolted to one wall. It had the clean, industrious air of a room that had just been vigorously swept with a birch-twig broom.

“Sit,” Mayakovsky said.

Quentin sat. The professor placed in front of him, one by one, like a man setting up a chessboard, a hammer, a block of wood, a box of nails, a sheet of paper, and a small book bound in pale vellum.

Mayakovsky tapped the paper.

“Hammer Charm of Legrand,” he said. “You know it?”

Everybody knew it. It was a standard teaching charm. While simple in theory — all it did was ensure that a hammered nail would go in straight, in one shot — it was extraordinarily persnickety to cast. It existed in literally thousands of permutations, depending on the Circumstances. Casting Legrand was probably harder than just hammering the damn nail in the old-fashioned way, but it came in handy for didactic purposes.

Mayakovsky tapped the book with a thick-nailed finger.

“This book, each page describes a different set of Circumstances. All different. Understand? Place, weather, stars, season — you will see. You turn the page, you cast the spell according to each set of Circumstances. Good practice. I’ll come back when you finish book. Khorosho? ”

Mayakovsky’s Russian accent was getting thicker as the day wore on. He was dropping his contractions and definite articles. He closed the door behind him. Quentin opened the book. Somebody not very creative had written ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE on the first page. Something told Quentin that Mayakovsky had noticed the graffiti but let it stand.

Soon Quentin knew Legrand’s Hammer Charm better than he wanted to know any spell ever. Page by page the Circumstances listed in the book became more and more esoteric and counterfactual. He cast Legrand’s Hammer Charm at noon and at midnight, in summer and winter, on mountaintops and a thousand yards beneath the earth’s surface. He cast the spell underwater and on the surface of the moon. He cast it in early evening during a blizzard on a beach on the island of Mangareva, which would almost certainly never happen since Mangareva is part of French Polynesia, in the South Pacific. He cast the spell as a man, as a woman, and once — was this really relevant? — as a hermaphrodite. He cast it in anger, with ambivalence, and with bitter regret.

By then Quentin’s mouth was dry. His fingertips were numb. He had pounded his thumb with the hammer four times. The block of wood was now crammed with flattened iron nail heads. Quentin groaned soundlessly and let his head loll back against the hard back of the chair. The door flew open, and Professor Mayakovsky entered carrying a jingling tray.

He set the tray down on the desk. It supported a cup of hot tea, a tumbler of water, a plate with a pat of yeasty European butter and a thick slab of sourdough bread on it, and a glass containing what would turn out to be two fingers of peppery vodka, one finger of which Mayakovsky drank off himself before placing it on the table.

When he was done he slapped Quentin hard across the face.

“That is for doubting yourself,” he said.

Quentin stared at him. He lifted a hand to his cheek, thinking: This man is batshit insane. He could do anything to us out here.

Mayakovsky turned the book back to the first page again. He turned the piece of paper with the spell on it over and patted it. On the back was written another spell: Bujold’s Sorcerous Nail Extraction.

“Begin again, please.”

Wax on, wax off.

When Mayakovsky was gone, Quentin stood up and stretched. Both his knees cracked. Instead of beginning again he went over to the tiny window looking out on the lunar snowfields. The sheer monochromaticity of the landscape was beginning to make him hallucinate colors. The sun had not moved at all.

That was how Quentin’s first month at Brakebills South went. The spells changed, and the Circumstances were different, but the room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition. Mayakovsky’s ominous warnings had been entirely justified, and arguably a little understated. Even during his worst moments at Brakebills, Quentin had always had a niggling suspicion that he was getting away with something by being there, that the sacrifices asked of him by his instructors, however great, were cheap by comparison with the rewards of the life he could look forward to as a magician. At Brakebills South, for the first time, he felt like he was giving value for money.

And he understood why they’d been sent here. What Mayakovsky was asking of them was impossible. The human brain was not meant to ingest these quantities of information. If Fogg had tried to enforce this regimen back at Brakebills, there would have been an insurrection.

It was difficult to gauge how the others were holding up. They met at mealtimes and passed in the hall, but because of the prohibition against speech there was no commiserating, just glances and shrugs and not much of that. Their gazes met bleakly over the breakfast table and turned away. Eliot’s eyes were empty, and Quentin supposed his own probably looked the same way. Even Janet’s animated features were set and frozen. No notes were exchanged. Whatever enchantment kept them from talking was global: their pens wouldn’t write.

Quentin was losing interest in communicating anyway. He should have been ravenous for human contact, but instead he felt himself falling away from the others, deeper inside himself. He shuffled like a prisoner from bedroom to dining room to solitary classroom, down the stone corridors, under the tediously unblinking gaze of the white sun. Once he wandered up to the roof of the West Tower and found one of the others, a gangly extrovert named Dale, putting on a mime show for a listless audience, but it really wasn’t worth the effort of turning his head to follow what was going on. His sense of humor had died in the vastness.

Professor Mayakovsky seemed to expect this, as if he’d known it was going to happen. After the first three weeks he announced that he had lifted the spell that kept them from talking. The news was received in silence. Nobody had noticed.

Mayakovsky began to vary the routine. Most days were still devoted to grinding through the Circumstances and their never-ending Exceptions, but once in a while he introduced other exercises. In an empty hall he erected a three-dimensional maze composed of wire rings through which the students would levitate objects at speed, to sharpen their powers of concentration and control. At first they used marbles, then later steel balls only slightly narrower than the rings. When a ball brushed a ring a spark cracked between them, and the spellcaster felt a shock.

Later still they would guide fireflies through the same maze, influencing their tiny insect minds by force of will. They watched one another do this in silence, feeling envy at one another’s successes and contempt for one another’s failures. The regime had divided them against each other. Janet in particular was bad at it — she tended to overpower her fireflies, to the point where they would crisp up in midair and become puffs of ash. Mayakovsky, stony-faced, just made her start over, while tears of wordless frustration ran down her face. This could and did go on for hours. No one could leave the hall before everyone had completed the exercise. They slept there more than once.

As the weeks went by, and still no one spoke, they plowed deeper and deeper into areas of magic Quentin never thought he’d have the guts to try. They practiced transformations. He learned to unpack and parse the spell that had turned them into geese (much of the trick, it turned out, was in shedding, storing, and then restoring the difference in body mass). They spent a hilarious afternoon as polar bears, wandering clumsily in a herd over the packed snow, swatting harmlessly at each other with giant yellow paws, encased as they were in layers of fur, hide, and fat. Their bear bodies felt clumsy and top heavy, and they kept toppling over sideways onto their backs by accident. More hilarity.

Nobody liked him, but it became apparent that Mayakovsky was no fraud. He could do things Quentin had never seen done at Brakebills, things he didn’t think had been done for centuries. One afternoon he demonstrated, but did not allow them to try, a spell that reversed the flow of entropy. He smashed a glass globe and then neatly restored it again, like a film clip run in reverse. He popped a helium balloon and then knitted it back together and refilled it with its original helium atoms, in some cases fishing them from deep inside the lungs of spectators who had inhaled them. He used camphor to smother a spider — he showed no particular remorse about this — and then, frowning with the effort, brought the spider back to life. Quentin watched the poor thing creep around in circles on the tabletop, hopelessly traumatized, making little dazed rushes at nothing and then retreating to a corner, hunched up and twitching, while Mayakovsky moved on to another topic.

One day, about three months into the semester, Mayakovsky announced that they would be transforming into Arctic foxes for the afternoon. It was an odd choice — they’d already done a few mammals, and it was no tougher than becoming a goose. But why quibble? Being an Arctic fox turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun. As soon as the change was in effect Quentin shot out across the snowpack on his four twinkling paws. His little fox body was so fast and light, and his eyes were so close to the ground, that it was like flying a high-performance jet at low altitude. Tiny ridges and crumbs of snow loomed up like mountains and boulders. He leaped over them and dodged around them and crashed through them. When he tried to turn he was going so fast he skidded and wiped out in a huge plume of snow. The rest of the pack gleefully piled on top of him, yipping and yapping and snapping.

It was an amazing outpouring of collective joy. Quentin had forgotten he was capable of that emotion, the way a lost spelunker feels like there never was such a thing as sunlight, that it was just a cruel fiction. They chased one another around in circles, panting and rolling and acting like idiots. It was funny, Quentin thought, with his stupid little miniature fox brain, the way he could automatically recognize everybody as foxes. That was Eliot with the snaggle-teeth. That plump blue-white critter was Josh. That small, silky specimen with the wide eyes was Alice.

Somewhere in the goofing off a game spontaneously evolved. It had something to do with pushing around a chunk of ice with your paws and your nose as fast as possible. Beyond that the point of the game wasn’t really clear, but they frantically pounced on the chunk of ice, or pounced on whoever had pounced on it just before them, and pushed it until the next person pounced on them.

An Arctic fox’s eyes weren’t all that much to brag about, but its nose was unbelievable. Quentin’s new nose was a Goddamned sensory masterpiece. Even in the middle of the fray he could recognize classmates by snuffing their fur. Increasingly, Quentin noticed one scent more than the others. It was a sharp, acrid, skunky musk that probably would have smelled like cat piss to a human being, but to a fox it was like a drug. He caught flashes of it in the fray every few minutes, and every time he did it grabbed his attention and jerked him around like a fish on a hook.

Something was happening to the game. It was losing its cohesion. Quentin was still playing, but fewer and fewer of his fellow foxes were playing with him. Eliot lit out in a streak off into the snow dunes. The pack dwindled to ten, then eight. Where were they going? Quentin’s fox brain barked. And what the hell was that unbe-fucking-lievable smell he kept stumbling on? There it was again! This time he tackled the source of the smell, buried his snuffling muzzle in her fur, because of course he had known all along, with what was left of his consciousness, that what he was smelling was Alice.

It was totally against the rules, but breaking the rules turned out to be as much fun as obeying them. How had he never figured that out before? The others were playing more and more wildly — they weren’t even trying to go after the chunk of ice anymore — and the game was disintegrating into little knots of tussling foxes, and he was tussling with Alice. Vulpine hormones and instincts were powering up, taking over, manhandling what was left of his rational human mind.

He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn’t seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. Something crazy and urgent was going on, and there was no way to stop it, or probably there was but why would you? Stopping was one of those pointless, life-defeating human impulses for which his merry little fox brain had nothing but contempt.

He caught a glimpse of Alice’s wild dark fox’s eye rolling with terror and then half shutting with pleasure. Their tiny quick breaths puffed white in the air and mingled and disappeared. Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.

The snow burned underneath them. It glowed hot like a bed of coals. They were on fire, and they let the fire consume them.

To an outside observer breakfast the next day wouldn’t have looked much different than it usually did. Everybody shuffled in in their loose-fitting, all-white Brakebills South uniforms, sat down without speaking or looking at one another, and ate what was put in front of them. But Quentin felt like he was walking on the moon. Giant slow-motion steps, ringing silence, vacuum all around him, a television audience of millions. He didn’t dare look at anybody else, least of all Alice.

She was sitting across the table and three people down from him, impassive and unperturbed, calmly focused on her oatmeal. He couldn’t have guessed within a light-year what she was thinking. Though he knew what was on everybody else’s minds. He was sure they all knew what had happened. They’d been right out in the open, for God’s sake. Or had they all been doing the same thing? Did everybody pair off? His face felt hot. He didn’t even know if she was a virgin. Or, if she had been whether she still was one.

It would all be so much simpler if he even understood what it meant, but he didn’t. Could he be in love with Alice? He tried to compare what he felt for her with his remembered feelings for Julia, but the two emotions were worlds apart. Things just got out of control, that’s all. It wasn’t them, it was their fox bodies. Nobody had to take it too seriously.

Mayakovsky sat at the head of the table looking smug. He had known this was going to happen, Quentin thought furiously, stabbing at his cheese grits with a fork. A bunch of teenagers cooped up in the Fortress of Solitude for two months, then stuck in the bodies of stupid horny animals. Of course we were going to go crazy.

Whatever perverted personal satisfaction Mayakovsky got out of what happened, it became obvious over the next week that it was also a practical piece of personnel management, because Quentin reapplied himself to his magical studies with the laserlike focus of a person desperate to avoid meeting anybody else’s eyes or thinking about things that actually mattered, like how he really felt about Alice, and who it was who had had sex with her out on the ice, him or the fox. It was back to the grind, pounding his way through Circumstances and Exceptions and a thousand mnemonics designed to force him to embed a thousand trivial particles of data in the soft tissue of his already supersaturated mind.

They fell into a collective tribal trance. The depleted palette of the Antarctic world hypnotized them. The shifting snows outside briefly revealed a low ridge of dark shale, the only topographical feature in a featureless world, and the students watched it from the roof like television. It reminded him of the desert in The Wandering Dune—God, he hadn’t thought about Fillory for ages. Quentin wondered if the rest of the world, his life before this, had just been a lurid dream. When he pictured the globe now it was entirely Antarctic, a whole world over which this monochromatic continent had metastasized like an icy cancer.

He went a little insane. They all did, though it took them in different ways. Some of the others became obsessed with sex. Their higher functions were so numb and exhausted they became animals, desperate for any kind of contact that wouldn’t ask words of them. Impromptu orgies were not unheard of. Quentin came upon them once or twice in the evenings — they would gather in apparently arbitrary combinations, in an empty classroom or in somebody’s bedroom, in semi-anonymous chains, their white uniforms half or all the way off, their eyes glassy and bored as they pulled and stroked and pumped, always in silence. He saw Janet take part once. The display was as much for other people as for themselves, but Quentin never joined in or even watched, just turned away, feeling superior and also strangely angry. Maybe he was just angry that something kept him from jumping in. He was disproportionately relieved that he never saw Alice there.

Time passed, or at least Quentin knew that, according to theory, it pretty much had to be passing, though he didn’t personally see much evidence of it, unless you counted the weird menagerie of mustaches and beards he and his male classmates were growing. However much he ate he got thinner and thinner. His state of mind devolved from mesmerized to hallucinatory. Tiny random things became charged with overwhelming significance — a round pebble, a stray straw from a broom, a dark mark on a white wall — that dissipated again minutes later. In the classroom he sometimes saw fantastical creatures mixed in with his classmates — a huge, elegant brown stick insect that clung to the back of a chair; a giant lizard with horny skin and a German accent, whose head burned with white fire — though afterward he could never be sure if he had imagined them. Once he thought he saw the man whose face was hidden by a branch. He couldn’t take this much longer.

Then, just like that, one morning over breakfast Mayakovsky announced that there were two weeks remaining in the semester, and it was time they gave serious thought to the final exam. The test was simply this: they would walk from Brakebills South to the South Pole. The distance was on the order of five hundred miles. They would be given no food and no maps and no clothing. They would have to protect and sustain themselves by magic. Flying was out of bounds — they would go on foot or not at all, and in the form of human beings, not as bears or penguins or some other naturally cold-resistant animal. Cooperation between students was prohibited — they could view it as a race, if they liked. There was no time limit. The exam was not mandatory.

Two weeks wasn’t quite long enough to prepare properly, but it was more than long enough for the decision to hang over them. Yes or no, in or out? Mayakovsky stressed that safety precautions would be minimal. He would do his best to keep track of them in the field, but there was no guarantee that if they screwed up he’d be able to rescue their sorry, hypothermic asses.

There was a lot to study up on. Would sunburn be a problem? Snow blindness? Should they toughen the soles of their feet or try to create some kind of magical footwear? Was there any way to get mutton fat, which they could need to cast Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth, from the kitchen? And if the test wasn’t even mandatory, then what was the point of it? What would happen if they failed? It sounded more like a ritual or a hazing than a final exam.

On the last morning Quentin got up early with the idea of foraging for contraband spell components in the kitchen. He had made up his mind to compete. He had to know if he could do it or not. It was that simple.

Most of the cupboards were locked — he probably wasn’t the first student to have thought of it — but he did manage to load up his pockets with flour and a stray silver fork and some old sprouting garlic cloves that might come in handy for something, he didn’t know what. He headed downstairs.

Alice was waiting for him on the landing between floors.

“I have to ask you something,” she said, her voice full of crisp determination. “Are you in love with me? It’s okay if you aren’t, I just want to know.”

She made it almost all the way through, but she couldn’t quite say the last phrase full voice and whispered it instead.

He hadn’t even met her eyes since the afternoon they’d been foxes together. Three weeks at least. Now they stood together on the smooth, freezing stone floor, abjectly human. How could a person who hadn’t washed or cut her hair in five months be so beautiful?

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was scratchy from lack of use. The words felt more frightening than any spell he had ever cast. “I mean, you’d think I would, but I don’t. I really don’t know.”

He tried to make his tone light and conversational, but his body felt heavy. The floor was accelerating rapidly upward with both of them on it. At that moment, when he should have been most lucidly present, he had no idea whether he was lying or telling the truth. With all the time he’d spent studying here, everything he’d learned, why hadn’t he learned this one thing? He was failing both of them, himself and Alice.

“It’s okay,” she said, with a quick little smile that strained the ligaments that held Quentin’s heart in his chest. “I didn’t think so. I was more wondering whether you would lie about it.”

He was lost. “Was I supposed to lie?”

“It’s okay, Quentin. It was nice. The sex, I mean. You do realize it’s all right to have nice things sometimes, right?”

She saved him from having to answer by standing up on tiptoe and kissing him softly on the lips. Her lips were dry and chapped, but the tip of her tongue was soft and warm. It felt like the last warm thing in the world.

“Try not to die,” she said.

She patted his rough cheek and disappeared down the stairs ahead of him in the predawn twilight.

After that ordeal the test was almost an afterthought. They were released separately out onto the snowpack, at intervals, to discourage collaboration. Mayakovsky made Quentin disrobe first — so much for the flour and the garlic and that bent silver fork — and walk naked out beyond the range of the protective spells that kept the temperature bearable at Brakebills South. As he passed through the invisible perimeter the cold hit him face-first, and it was beyond all belief. Quentin’s whole body spasmed and contracted. It felt like he’d been dropped into burning kerosene. The air seared his lungs. He bent over, hands jammed in his armpits.

“Happy trails,” Mayakovsky called. He tossed Quentin a Ziploc bag full of something gray and greasy. Mutton fat. “Bog s’vami.”

Whatever. Quentin knew he had only a few seconds before his fingers would be too numb for spellcasting. He tore open the bag and jammed his hands inside and stuttered out Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth. It got easier after that. He layered on the rest of the spells by turns: protection from the wind and the sun, speed, strong legs, toughened feet. He threw up a navigation spell, and a great luminous golden compass wheel that only he could see appeared overhead in the white sky.

Quentin knew the theory behind the spells, but he’d never tested them all together at full strength. He felt like a superhero. He felt bionic. He was in business.

He turned to face the S on the compass wheel and trotted off toward the horizon at speed, circling around the building he’d just left, bare feet fluffing silently through bone-dry powder. With the strength spells in place his thighs felt like pneumatic pistons. His calves were steel truck springs. His feet were as tough and numb as Kevlar brake shoes.

Afterward he remembered almost nothing of the week that followed. The whole thing was very clinical. Reduced to its technical essence, it was a problem of resource management, of nurturing and guarding and fanning the little flickering flame of life and consciousness within his body as the entire continent of Antarctica tried to leach away the heat and sugar and water that kept it burning.

He slept lightly and very little. His urine turned a deep amber then ceased to flow entirely. The monotony of the scenery was relentless. Each low crunchy ridge he topped revealed a vista composed of its identical clones, arranged in a pattern of infinite regress. His thoughts went around in circles. He lost track of time. He sang the Oscar Mayer jingle and the Simpsons theme song. He talked to James and Julia. Sometimes he confused James with Martin Chatwin and Julia with Jane. The fat melted out of his body; his ribs grew more prominent, tried to push their way out through his skin. He had to be careful. His margin of error was not large. The spells he was using were powerful and highly durable, with a life of their own. He could die out here, and his corpse would probably keep jogging merrily along toward the pole on its own.

Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a lipless blue crevasse would open beneath his feet, and he would have to trot around it or cross it with a magic-assisted leap. Once he stumbled right into one and fell forty feet down into blue-tinted darkness. The ward-and-shield spells around his pale, nude body were so thick that he barely noticed. He just ground to a slow stop, jammed in between two rough ice walls, and then lifted himself back out again, like the Lorax, and kept on running.

Even as his physical strength faded he leaned on the iron magical vigor that his sojourn under Professor Mayakovsky had given him. It no longer felt like a fluke when he worked magic successfully. The worlds of magical and physical reality felt equally real and present to him. He summoned simple spells into being without conscious thought. He reached for the magical force within him as naturally as he would reach for the salt on the dinner table. He had even gained the ability to extemporize a little, to guess at magical Circumstances when he hadn’t been drilled on them. The implications of this were stunning: magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape — a fractal, chaotic shape, but subconsciously his blindly groping mental fingertips had begun to parse it.

He remembered a lecture Mayakovsky had given a few weeks before, which at the time he hadn’t paid much attention to. Now, however, jogging forever south across the frozen, broken plains, it came back to him almost word for word.

“You dislike me,” Mayakovsky had begun. “You are sick of the sight of me, skraelings.” That was what he called them, skraelings. Apparently it was a Viking word that meant, roughly, “wretches.”

“But if you listen to me only one more time in your lives, listen to me now. Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely. Not all of you — Dale, I think you in particular are unlikely to cross that Rubicon. But for some of you spells will one day come very easily, almost automatically, with very little in the way of conscious effort.

“When the change comes, I ask only that you know it for what it is, and be aware. For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength.”

Mayakovsky stared out at their silent faces a moment longer, with undisguised disgust, then stepped down from the lectern. “Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”

When night finally fell the stars burned shrilly overhead with impossible force and beauty. Quentin jogged with his head up, knees high, no longer feeling anything below his waist, gloriously isolated, lost in the spectacle. He became nothing, a running wraith, a wisp of warm flesh in a silent universe of midnight frost.

Once, for a few minutes, the darkness was disturbed by a flickering on the horizon. He realized it must be another student, another skraeling like himself, moving on a parallel path but way off to the east, twenty or thirty miles at least, and ahead of him. He thought about changing course to make contact. But seriously, what was the point? Should he risk getting busted for collaborating, just to say hi? What did he, a wraith, a wisp of warm flesh, need with anybody else?

Whoever it was, he thought dispassionately, was using a different set of spells than he was. He couldn’t piece out the magic at this distance, but they were throwing off a whole lot of pale pink-white light.

Inefficient, he thought. Inelegant.

When the sun rose he lost sight of the other student again.

Some immeasurable period of time later, Quentin blinked. He had lost the habit of closing his magically weatherproofed eyes, but something was bothering him. It was a matter for concern, though he could barely formulate why in any conscious, coherent way. There was a black spot in his vision.

The landscape had, if anything, gotten more monotonous. Far behind him were the moments when streaks of dark frozen schist occasionally marred the white snow. Once he’d passed what he was fairly sure was a fallen meteorite stuck in the ice, a lump of something black, like a lost charcoal briquette. But that was a long time ago.

He was far gone. After days without real sleep his mind was a machine for monitoring spells and moving his feet, nothing else. But while he was checking off anomalies, there was something screwy going on with his compass wheel, too. It wobbled erratically, and it was getting kind of distorted. The N had grown vast and swollen; it was taking up five-sixths of the circle, and the other directions had withered away to almost nothing. The S he was supposed to be following had shrunk to a tiny squiggle in microscopic jewel type.

The black spot was taller than it was wide, and it bobbed up and down with his stride the way an external object would. So it wasn’t corneal damage. And it was growing larger and larger, too. It was Mayakovsky, standing by himself in the powdery nothingness, holding a blanket. He must be at the pole. Quentin had completely forgotten where he was going or why.

When he got close enough Mayakovsky caught him. The tall man grunted, wrapping the heavy, scratchy blanket around him, and swung him down to the snow. Quentin’s legs kept moving for a few seconds, then he lay still, panting, on his side, twitching like a netted fish. It was the first time in nine days that he’d stopped running. The sky spun. He retched.

Mayakovsky stood over him.

“Molodyetz, Quentin. Good man. Good man. You made it. You are going home.”

There was something odd in Mayakovsky’s voice. The sneer was gone, and it was thick with emotion. A twisted smile revealed for a moment the older wizard’s yellow teeth in his unshaven face. He hauled Quentin to his feet with one hand; the other hand he flourished, and a portal appeared in the air. He shoved Quentin unceremoniously through it.

Quentin staggered and fell into a psychedelic riot of green that assaulted him so violently that at first he didn’t recognize it as the rear terrace of Brakebills on a hot summer day. After the blankness of the polar ice the campus was a hallucinatory swirl of sound and color and warmth. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. He was home.

He rolled over on his back on the baking smooth stone. Birds sang deafeningly. He opened his eyes. A sight even stranger than the trees and the grass met them: looking back through the portal, he could still see the tall, soft-shouldered magician standing there with Antarctica in the background. Snow kicked up around him. A few stray crystals drifted through and evaporated in midflight. It looked like a painting executed on an oval panel and hung in midair. But the magical window was already closing. He must be preparing himself to go back to his empty polar mansion, Quentin thought. He waved, but Mayakovsky wasn’t looking at him. He was looking out at the Maze and the rest of the Brakebills campus. The unguarded longing on his face was so excruciating Quentin had to look away.

Then the portal closed. It was over. It was late May, and the air was full of pollen. After the rarefied atmosphere of Antarctica it tasted hot and thick as soup. It was a lot like that first day he’d come to Brakebills, straight through from that frigid Brooklyn afternoon. The sun beat down. He sneezed.

They were all waiting for him, or almost all: Eliot and Josh and Janet, at least, wearing their old school uniforms, looking fat and happy and relaxed and none the worse for wear, like they’d done nothing for the past six months but sit on their asses and eat grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Welcome back,” Eliot said. He was munching a yellow pear. “They only told us ten minutes ago you might be coming through.”

“Wow.” Josh’s eyes were round. “Man, you look skinny. Wizard needs food badly. And also maybe a shower.”

Quentin knew he had only a minute or two before he burst into tears and passed out. He still had Mayakovsky’s scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him. He looked down at his pale, frozen feet. Nothing looked frostbitten, anyway, though one of his toes was sticking out at an angle. It didn’t hurt yet.

It was very, very comfortable, deliriously comfortable, lying on his back on the hot stone like this, with the others looking down at him. He knew he should probably get up, for the sake of politeness if for no other reason, but he didn’t feel like moving yet. He thought he might just stay where he was for another minute. He had earned himself a rest.

“Are you all right?” Josh said. “What was it like?”

“Alice kicked your ass,” Janet said. “She got back two days ago. She already went home.”

“You were out there a week and a half,” Eliot said. “We were worried about you.”

Why did they keep talking? If he could just gaze up at them in silence, that would be perfect. Just look at them and listen to the chirping birds and feel the warm flagstones holding him up. And maybe somebody could get him a glass of water, he was desperately thirsty. He tried to articulate this last sentiment, but his throat was dry and cracked. He wound up just making a tiny creaking noise.

“Oh, I think he wants to know about us,” Janet said. She took a bite of Eliot’s pear. “Yeah, nobody else went out but you two. What — you think we’re stupid?”

ALICE

Quentin didn’t spend any time in Brooklyn that summer because his parents didn’t live there anymore. Abruptly and without consulting him, they’d sold off their Park Slope town house for a colossal sum and semiretired to a faux-Colonial McMansion in a placid suburb of Boston called Chesterton, where Quentin’s mother could paint full time and his father could do God only knew what.

The shock of being severed from the place he grew up in was all the more surprising because it never really came. Quentin looked for the part of him that should have missed his old neighborhood, but it wasn’t there. He supposed he must have been shedding his old identity and his old life all along, without noticing it. This just made the cut cleaner and neater. Really, it was probably easier this way. Not that his parents had made the move out of kindness, or any logic other than the obvious financial one.

The Chesterton house was yellow with green shutters and sat on an acre so aggressively landscaped that it looked like a virtual representation of itself. Though it was trimmed and detailed in a vaguely Colonial style, it was so enormous — bulging in all directions with extra wings and gables and roofs — that it looked like it had been inflated rather than constructed. Huge cement air-conditioning bunkers hummed outside night and day. It was even more unreal than the real world usually was.

When Quentin arrived home for summer vacation — Brakebills summer, September for the rest of the world — his parents were alarmed at his gaunt appearance, his hollow, shell-shocked eyes, his haunted demeanor. But their curiosity about him was, as always, mild enough to be easily manageable, and he started gaining weight back quickly with the help of their massive, ever-full suburban refrigerator.

At first it was a relief just to be warm all the time, and to sleep in every day, and to be free of Mayakovsky and the Circumstances and that merciless white winter light. But after seventy-two hours Quentin was already bored again. In Antarctica he’d fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast. The long silences at Brakebills South had made him impatient with small talk. He had no interest in TV anymore — it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway. Real life — or was it fantasy life? whichever one Brakebills was — that was what mattered, and that was happening somewhere else.

As he usually did when he was stuck at home, he went on a Fillory binge. The old 1970s-era covers looked more and more dated every time he saw them, with their psychedelic Yellow Submarine palette, and on a couple of them the covers had come off completely and been tucked back between the pages as bookmarks. But the world inside the books was as fresh and vital as ever, unfaded and unironized by time. Quentin had never before really appreciated the cleverness of the second book. The Girl Who Told Time, in which Rupert and Helen are abruptly shanghaied into Fillory straight out of their respective boarding schools, the only time the Chatwins cross over in winter instead of summer. They end up back in an earlier time period, one that overlaps with the storyline of the first book. With the aid of foreknowledge, Rupert dogs Martin’s and Helen’s footsteps — the earlier Helen’s — as they repeat the action of The World in the Walls, note for note. He keeps just out of view, dropping clues and helping them out without their knowledge (the mysterious character known only as the Wood One turns out to have been Rupert in disguise); Quentin wondered if Plover wrote The Girl Who Told Time just to shore up all the plot holes in The World in the Walls.

Meanwhile Helen embarks on a hunt for the mysterious Questing Beast of Fillory, which according to legend can’t be caught, but if you do catch it — all logic aside — it’s supposed to give you your heart’s desire. The Beast leads her on a tricksy, circuitous chase that somehow winds in and out of the enchanted tapestries that adorn the library of Castle Whitespire. She only ever catches a glimpse of it, peeking coyly out at her from behind an embroidered shrub before vanishing in a flicker of cloven hoofs.

At the end the twin rams Ember and Umber show up as usual, like a pair of sinister ruminant constables. They were a force for good, of course, but there was a slightly Orwellian quality to their oversight of Fillory: they knew everything that went on, and there was no obvious limit to their powers, but they rarely bestirred themselves to actively intervene on behalf of the creatures in their charge. Mostly they just scolded everybody involved for the mess they’d made, finishing each other’s sentences, then made everyone renew their vows of fealty before wandering away to crop some luckless farmer’s alfalfa fields. They firmly usher Rupert and Helen back into the real world, back into the damp, chilly, dark-wood-paneled halls of their boarding schools, as if they had never left it.

Quentin even plowed through The Wandering Dune, the fifth and last book in the series (that is, the last as far as anybody but Quentin knew) and not a fan favorite. It was longer by half than any of the other books and starred Helen and the youngest Chatwin, clever, introverted Jane. The tone of The Wandering Dune is different from earlier books: having spent the last two volumes searching fruitlessly for their vanished brother, Martin, the Chatwins’ usual cheery English indomitability has been tempered by a wistful mood. On entering Fillory the two girls encounter a mysterious sand dune being blown through the kingdom, all by itself. They climb the dune and find themselves riding it through the green Fillorian countryside and on out into a dreamy desert wasteland in the far south, where they spend most of the rest of the book.

Almost nothing happens. Jane and Helen fill up the pages with interminable conversations about right and wrong and teenage Christian metaphysics and whether their true obligations lie on Earth or in Fillory. Jane is desperately worried about Martin but also, like Quentin, a little jealous: whatever iron law kept the Chatwins from staying in Fillory forever, he had found a loophole, or it had found him. Alive or dead, he had managed to overstay his tourist visa.

But Helen, who has a scoldy streak, heaps scorn on Martin — she thinks he’s just hiding in Fillory so he won’t have to go home. He’s the child who doesn’t want to leave the playground, or who won’t go to bed. He’s Peter Pan. Why can’t he grow up and face the real world? She calls him selfish, self-indulgent, “the biggest baby of us all.”

In the end the sisters are picked up by a majestic clipper ship that sails through the sand as if it were water. The ship is crewed by large bunnies who would be overly cutesy (the Wandering Dune-haters always compared them to Ewoks) if it weren’t for their impressively hard-assed attention to the technical details of operating their complex vessel.

The bunnies leave Jane and Helen with a gift, a set of magical buttons they can use to zap themselves from Earth to Fillory and back at will. On returning to England, Helen, in a fit of self-righteousness, promptly hides the buttons and won’t tell Jane where they are, upon which Jane excoriates her in fine period vernacular and turns the entire household upside down and inside out. But she never finds the buttons, and on that unsatisfying note the book, and the whole series, ends.

Even if it didn’t turn out to be the final book in the series, Quentin wondered where Plover could possibly have gone with the story in The Magicians. For one thing he was out of Chatwins: the books always featured two Chatwin children, an older one from the previous book and a new, younger one. But pretty, dark-haired Jane was the last and youngest Chatwin. Would she have gone back to Fillory alone? It broke the pattern.

For another, half of the fun of the books was waiting for the Chatwins to find their way into Fillory, for the magic door that opens for them and them only to appear. You always knew it would, and it always surprised you when it did. But with the buttons you could shuttle back and forth at will. Where was the miracle in that? Maybe that was why Helen hid them. They might as well have built a subway to Fillory.

Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater. In the mornings he lay in bed as long as he could stand it, in an attempt to avoid breakfast with them, but they always waited him out. He couldn’t win: they had even less to do than he did. Sometimes he wondered if it was a perverse game they played, that they were in on and he wasn’t.

He would come down to find them sitting at a table littered with crusts and crumbs and clementine peels and cereal bowls. While he pretended to be interested in the Chesterton Chestnut, he would furiously search for some even remotely plausible topic of conversation:

“So. Are you guys still going on that trip to South America?”

“South America?” His dad looked up, startled, as if he’d forgotten Quentin was there.

“Aren’t you going to South America?”

A look passed between Quentin’s parents.

“Spain. We’re going to Spain and Portugal.”

“Oh, Portugal. Right. I was thinking Peru for some reason.”

“Spain and Portugal. It’s for your mother. There’s an artists’ exchange with the university in Lisbon. Then we’re going to take a boat trip down the Tigris.”

“Tagus, darling!” Quentin’s mother said, with her tinkling I-married-an-idiot! laugh. “The Tagus! The Tigris is in Iraq.”

She bit into a piece of raisin toast with her large straight teeth.

“Well, I don’t think we’ll be sailing down the Tigris anytime soon!” Quentin’s father laughed loudly at this, exactly as if it were funny, and then paused for thought. “Darling, do you remember that week we spent in a houseboat on the Volga…?”

An extended Russian reminiscence followed, a duet punctuated by significant silences that Quentin interpreted as allusions to sexual activities that he didn’t want to know about. It was enough to make you envy the Chatwins, with Dad in the army and Mum in the madhouse. Mayakovsky would have known what to do with this kind of conversation. He would have silenced it. He wondered how hard that spell was to learn.

By about eleven every morning Quentin would hit his limit and flee the house for the relative safety of Chesterton, which stubbornly refused to reveal even the slightest hint of mystery or intrigue beneath its green, self-satisfied exterior. He had never learned to drive, so he rode his father’s white 1970s-era ten-speed, which weighed approximately one metric ton, to the center of town. Out of deference to its glorious Colonial heritage the town was governed by a set of draconian zoning laws that kept everything in a state of permanent unnatural quaintness.

Knowing no one, caring about nothing, Quentin took a tour of the low-ceilinged, heavy-timbered residence of some Revolutionary luminary. He inspected a boxy white-painted Unitarian church, est. 1766. He surveyed the lush flat lawns where amateur Continental irregulars had faced off against well-drilled, well-armed Redcoats, with predictable results. There was one pleasant surprise, hidden behind the church: a lovely half-vanished seventeenth-century graveyard, a little square glebe of ultra-green grass scattered with wet saffron-colored elm leaves, with a bent wrought-iron fence around it. Inside, it was cool and hushed.

The gravestones were all winged skulls and bad devotional quatrains about whole families carried off by fever, weathered in places into illegibility. Quentin crouched down on the wet grass to try to decipher one very old one, a rectangle of blue slate that had split in half and sunk halfway into the green turf, which rose up to meet it like a wave.

“Quentin.”

He straightened up. A woman about his age had come in through the cemetery gate.

“Hi?” he said cautiously. How did she know his name?

“I guess you didn’t think I would find you,” she said unsteadily. “I guess you didn’t think of that.”

She walked right up to him. At the last possible moment, too late to do anything about it, he realized that she wasn’t going to stop. Without breaking stride she grabbed the front of his barn jacket and marched him stumbling backward over a low footstone right into the aromatic branches of a cypress tree. Her face, pushed right up in front of his, dangerously close, was an angry mask. It had been raining off and on all afternoon, and the needles were damp.

He resisted the impulse to struggle. He wasn’t going to be caught fighting a girl in a churchyard.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said. “Stop. Just stop.”

“Now I’m here,” she said, clinging precariously to her composure, “now I’m here, and we are going to talk. You are going to deal with me.”

Now that he had a closer look at her he could see she was covered in warning signs. Her whole body screamed unbalance. She was too pale and too thin. Her eyes were too wild. Her long dark hair was lank and smelled unwashed. She was dressed in a raggedy goth outfit — her arms were wrapped in what looked like black electrical tape. There were scabby red scratches on the backs of her hands.

He almost didn’t recognize her.

“I was there, and you were there,” Julia said, locking eyes with him. “Weren’t you. In that place. That school, or whatever it was. You got in, didn’t you?”

He got it then. She had been at the Exam after all, he hadn’t been mistaken, but she hadn’t made the cut. They’d culled her in the first round, during the written test.

But this was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen, there were safeguards against it. Anybody who flunked the Exam was supposed to have their memory gently, lovingly clouded by a faculty member and then overwritten with a plausible alibi. It wasn’t simple, nor was it outrageously ethical, but the spells were humane and well understood. Except in her case they hadn’t worked, or not completely.

“Julia,” he said. Their faces were very close together. There was nicotine on her breath. “Julia, what are you doing here?”

“Don’t pretend with me, don’t you dare pretend! You go to that school, don’t you? The magic school?”

Quentin kept his face blank. It was a basic rule at Brakebills not to discuss the school with outsiders. He could get expelled. But whatever, if Fogg screwed up the memory spells it wasn’t Quentin’s problem. And this was Julia. Her lovely freckly face, so close to his, looked much older. Her skin was blotchy. She was in agony.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. Sure. I go there.”

“I knew it!” she shrieked. She stamped her booted foot on the graveyard grass. From her reaction he guessed that she’d been at least halfway bluffing. “I knew it was real, I knew it was real,” she said, mostly to herself. “I knew it wasn’t a dream!” She bent over, with her hands over her face, and one convulsive sob escaped her.

Quentin took a deep breath. He readjusted his jacket.

“Listen,” he said gently. She was still doubled over. He bent down, putting a hand on her narrow back. “Julia. You’re not supposed to remember any of that stuff. They’re supposed to make you forget if you don’t get in.”

“But I should have!” She straightened up with the flashing red eyes and cold crystal seriousness of the true nutjob. “I was supposed to get in. I know I was. It was a mistake. Believe me, it was.” Her large eyes tried to burn into his. “I’m like you, I can do real magic. I’m like you. See? That’s why they couldn’t make me forget.”

Quentin saw. He could see everything. No wonder she’d been so altered the last time he saw her. That one glimpse through the curtain, of the world behind the world, had knocked her completely out of orbit. She’d seen it once, and she couldn’t let go. Brakebills had ruined her.

There was a time when he would have done anything for her. And he still would, he just didn’t know what to do. Why did he feel so guilty? He took a deep breath.

“But that’s not how it works. Even if you really can do magic, that wouldn’t make you any more resistant to memory spells than anybody else.”

She was staring at him hungrily. Everything he was saying just confirmed what she wanted to believe: that magic was real. He backed away, just to put some distance between them, but she grabbed his sleeve.

“Oh, no-no-no-no-no,” she said with a brittle smile. “Q. Please. Wait. No. You’re going to help me. That’s why I came here.”

She had dyed her hair black. It looked dry and burnt.

“Julia, I want to. I just don’t know what I can do.”

“Just watch this. Watch.”

She let go of his arm, reluctantly, as if she expected him to vanish or run away the instant she did. Incredibly, Julia launched into a basically correct version of a simple Basque optical spell called Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray.

She must have found it online. Some genuine magical information did circulate in the straight world, mostly on the Internet, though it was buried in so much bogus crap that nobody could tease out the real stuff, even if they could have used it. Quentin had even seen a Brakebills blazer for sale on eBay. It was extremely rare, but not unheard of, for civilians to work up a spell or two on their own, but as far as Quentin knew they never got into anything serious. Real magicians called them hedge witches. A few of them had careers as stage magicians, or set themselves up as cult demi-deities, gathering around themselves congregations of Wiccans and Satanists and oddball Christian outliers.

Julia proclaimed the words of the spell theatrically, overarticulating like she was doing summer-stock Shakespeare. She had no idea what she was doing. Quentin glanced nervously at the doorway at the back of the church.

“Look!” She held up her hand defiantly. The spell had actually worked, sort of. Her bitten-down fingertips left faint radiant rainbow trails in the air. She waved them around, making mystical gestures like an interpretive dancer. Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray was a totally useless spell. Quentin felt a pang when he thought about how many months, if not years, it must have cost her to figure it out.

“See?” she demanded, close to tears. “You see it too, right? It’s not too late for me. I won’t go back to college. Tell them. Tell them I could still come.”

“Does James know?”

She shook her head tightly. “He wouldn’t understand. I don’t see him anymore.”

He wanted to help her, but there was no way to. It was far, far too late. Better to be blunt about it. This could have been me, he thought. This was almost me.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” he said. “It’s not up to me. I’ve never heard of them changing their minds — no one ever gets a second Exam.”

But Alice got an Exam, he thought, even though she wasn’t Invited.

“You could tell them, though. You can’t decide, but you can tell them I’m here, right? That I’m still out here? You can at least do that!”

She grabbed his arm again, and he had to mutter a quick counterspell to snuff out the Prismatic Spray. That stuff could eat into fabric.

“Just tell them you saw me,” she said urgently, her eyes full of dying hope. “Please. I’ve been practicing. You can teach me. I’ll be your apprentice. I’ll do whatever you need. I have an aunt who lives in Winchester, I can live with her.

“Or what do you need, Quentin?” She moved closer to him, just slightly, so that her knee touched his knee. In spite of himself he felt the old electrical field form between them. She hazarded a curvy, sardonic smile, letting the moment hang in the air. “Maybe we can help each other. You used to want my help.”

He was angry at himself for being tempted. He was angry at the world for being this way. He wanted to yell obscenities. It would have been terrible to see anybody scrape the bottom like this, but her… it should have been anybody but her. She has already seen more unhappiness, Quentin thought, than I will ever see in my life.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Julia. If I tell them, they’re just going to find you and wipe your memory. For real this time.”

“They can try,” she snarled, suddenly fierce. “They tried once already.”

She breathed hard through pinched white nostrils.

“Just tell me where it is. Where we were. I’ve been looking for it. Just tell me where the school is, and I’ll leave you alone.”

Quentin could only imagine the kind of shit he’d be in if Julia showed up at the House hell-bent on matriculating and dropped his name.

“It’s in upstate New York. On the Hudson somewhere, I don’t know exactly where. I really don’t. It’s near West Point. They make it invisible. Even I don’t know how to find it. But I’ll tell them about you, if that’s truly what you want.”

He was just making it worse. Maybe he should have bluffed her after all, he thought. Tried harder to lie. Too late.

She put her arms around him, as if she were too exhausted by relief and despair to stand anymore, and he held her. There was a time when this was everything he wanted.

“They couldn’t make me forget,” she whispered into his chest. “Do you understand that? They couldn’t make me forget.”

He could feel her heart beating, and the word he heard when it beat was shame, shame, shame. He wondered why they hadn’t taken her. If anybody should have gone to Brakebills, it was her, not him. But they really would wipe her memory, he thought. Fogg would make sure this time. She’d be happier that way anyway. She could get back on track, go back to college, get back together with James, get on with her life. It would all be for the best.

By next morning he was back at Brakebills. The others were already there; they were surprised he’d lasted as long as he did. The most any of them had spent at home was forty-eight hours. Eliot hadn’t gone home at all.

It was cool and quiet in the Cottage. Quentin felt safe again. He was back where he belonged. Eliot was in the kitchen with a dozen eggs and a bottle of brandy, trying to make flips, which nobody wanted but which he was determined to make anyway. Josh and Janet were playing an idiotic card game called Push — it was basically the magical equivalent of War — that was wildly popular at Brakebills. Quentin just used it as a chance to show off his card-handling skills, which was why nobody ever wanted to play with him anymore.

While they played Janet told the story of Alice’s Antarctic ordeal, despite the fact that everybody except Quentin had heard it already, and Alice herself was right there in the room, silently paging through an old herbal in the window seat. Quentin didn’t know how he would feel about seeing Alice again, after he’d made such a comprehensive mess of their last conversation, but to his amazed relief, and despite every possible reason to the contrary, it wasn’t awkward at all. It was perfect. His heart clenched with silent happiness when he saw her.

“And then when Mayakovsky tried to give her the bag of sheep fat, she threw it back in his face!”

“I meant to hand it back to him,” Alice said quietly from the window seat. “But it was so cold and I was shaking so badly, I sort of flung it at him. He was all ‘chyort vozmi!’ ”

“Why didn’t you just take it?”

“I don’t know.” She put the book down. “I’d made all these plans for getting by without it, it just threw me off. Plus I wanted him to stop looking at me naked. And anyway I didn’t know he was going to have mutton fat for us. I hadn’t even prepared the Chkhartishvili.”

That was a white lie. Like Alice couldn’t have cast Chkhartishvili cold. He had missed her so much.

“So what did you do for heat?” he said.

“I tried using some of those German thermogenesis charms, but they kept fading away whenever I fell asleep. By the second night I was waking myself up every fifteen minutes just to make sure I was still alive. By the third day I was losing my mind. So I ended up using a tweaked Miller Flare.”

“I don’t get it.” Josh frowned. “How is that supposed to help?”

“If you kind of mangle it a little it becomes inefficient. The extra energy comes out as heat instead of light.”

“You know you could have cooked yourself by accident?” Janet said.

“I know. But when I realized the German thing wasn’t going to work, I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“I think I saw you once,” Quentin said quietly. “At night.”

“You couldn’t have missed me. I looked like a road flare.”

“A naked road flare,” Josh said.

Eliot came in with a tureen full of viscous, unappetizing flip and began ladling it into teacups. Alice picked up her book and headed for the stairs.

“Hang on, I’m coming back with the hot ones!” Eliot called, busily grating nutmeg.

Quentin didn’t hang on. He followed Alice.

At first he’d thought everything would be different between him and Alice. Then he thought everything was back to normal. Now he understood that he didn’t want things to be back to normal. He couldn’t stop looking at her, even after she’d looked at him, seen him looking at her, and looked away in embarrassment again. It was like she’d become charged in some way that drew him to her uncontrollably. He could sense her naked body inside her dress, smell it like a vampire smells blood. Maybe Mayakovsky hadn’t quite managed to get all the fox out of him.

He found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was lying on one of a pair of twin beds, on top of the bedspread, reading. It was dim and hot. The roof slanted in at an odd angle. The room was full of odd, old furniture — a wicker chair with a staved-in seat, a dresser with a stuck drawer — and it had deep red wallpaper that didn’t match any other room in the house. Quentin yanked up the window halfway — it made an outraged squawk — and flopped down on the other twin bed.

“Can you believe they have these here? It’s a full set — they were in the bookcase in the bathroom.” She held up the book she was reading. Incredibly, it was an old copy of The World in the Walls.

“I had that exact same edition.” The cover showed Martin Chatwin halfway through the old grandfather clock, with his feet still in this world and his amazed head poking into Fillory, which was drawn as a groovy 1970s disco winter wonderland.

“I haven’t looked at them for years. God, remember the Cozy Horse? That big velvet horse that would just carry you around? I wanted one so badly when I was that age. Did you read them?”

Quentin wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his Fillory obsession.

“I may have taken a look.”

Alice smirked and went back to the book. “Why is it that you still think you can keep secrets from me?”

Quentin folded his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the low, tilted ceiling. This wasn’t right. There was something brother-sister about it.

“Here. Budge over.”

He switched beds and lay down next to Alice, hip-checking her sideways to make room on the narrow bed. She held up the paperback, and they read together silently for a few pages. Their shoulders and upper arms touched. Quentin felt like the bed was on a train moving very fast, and if he looked out the window he’d see the landscape racing past. They were both breathing very carefully.

“I never got it about the Cozy Horse,” Quentin said after a while. “First of all, there’s only one of it. Is there a whole herd of Cozy Horses somewhere? And then it’s too useful. You’d think somebody would have domesticated it by now.”

She whacked his head with the spine, not completely gently.

“Somebody evil. You can’t break the Cozy Horse, the Cozy Horse is a free spirit. Anyway it’s too big. I always figured it was mechanical — somebody made it somehow.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. A magician. Somebody in the past. Anyway the Cozy Horse is a girl thing.”

Janet stuck her head in. Apparently the exodus downstairs was general.

“Ha!” Janet brayed. “I can’t believe you’re reading that.”

Alice scooched an inch away from him, instinctively, but he didn’t move.

“Like you didn’t,” Quentin said.

“Of course I did! When I was nine I made my family call me ‘Fiona’ for two weeks.”

She vanished, leaving behind a comfortable, echoless silence. The room was cooling down as hot air ascended out through the half-open window. Quentin imagined it rising in an invisible braided plume into the blue summer day.

“Did you know there really was a Chatwin family?” he asked. “In real life? Supposedly they lived next door to Plover.”

Alice nodded. She unscooched now that Janet was gone. “It’s sad though.”

“Sad how.”

“Well, do you know what happened to them?”

Quentin shook his head.

“There’s a book about it. Most of them grew up to be pretty boring. Housewives and insurance magnates and whatnot. I think one of the boys married an heiress. I know one got killed in World War Two. But you know the thing about Martin?”

Quentin shook his head.

“Well, you know how he disappears in the book? He really did disappear. He ran away or had an accident or something. One day after breakfast he just vanished, and they never saw him again.”

“The real Martin?”

“The real Martin.”

“God. That is sad.”

He tried to imagine it, a big fresh-faced, floppy-haired English family — he pictured them in a sepia-toned family portrait, in tennis whites — suddenly with a gaping hole opening in the middle of it. The somber announcement. The slow, decorous acceptance. The lingering damage.

“It makes me think of my brother,” Alice said.

“I know.”

At this she looked at him sharply. He looked back. It was true, he did know.

He propped himself up on one elbow so he could look down at her, the air around him whirling with excited dust motes. “When I was little,” he said slowly, “and even when I was not so little, I used to envy Martin.”

She smiled up at him.

“I know.”

“Because I thought he’d finally done it. I know it was supposed to be a tragedy, but to me it was like he broke the bank, beat the system. He got to stay in Fillory forever.”

“I know. I get it.” She put a restraining hand on his chest. “That’s what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean, we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don’t you.”

He felt flustered. “Is that wrong?”

She nodded and smiled even more brightly. “Yes, Quentin. It’s wrong.”

He kissed her, softly at first. Then he got up and locked the door.

And that’s how it started, though of course it had been starting for a long time. At first it was like they were getting away with something, as if they half expected someone or something to stop them. When nothing happened, and there were no consequences, they lost control — they ravenously, roughly pulled each other’s clothes off, not just out of desire for each other but out of a pure desire to lose control. It was like a fantasy. The sound of breathing and rustling cloth was thunderous in the little chaste bedroom. God only knew what they could hear downstairs. He wanted to push her, to see if she had it as bad as he did, to see how far she’d go and how far she’d let him go. She didn’t stop him. She pushed him ever further. It wasn’t his first time, or even his first time with Alice, technically, but this was different. This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals — because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.

They tried to be discreet about it — they barely even discussed it between themselves — but the others knew, and they came up with excuses to leave the two of them alone, and Quentin and Alice took them. Probably they were relieved that the tension between them was finally over. In its way the fact that Alice wanted Quentin as much as he wanted her was as much of a miracle as anything else he’d seen since he came to Brakebills, and no easier to believe, though he had no choice but to believe it. His love for Julia had been a liability, a dangerous force that lashed him to cold, empty Brooklyn. Alice’s love was so much more real, and it bound him finally and for good to his new life, his real life, at Brakebills. It fixed him here and nowhere else. It wasn’t a fantasy. It was flesh and blood.

And she understood that. She seemed to know everything about Quentin, everything he was thinking and feeling, sometimes before he did, and she wanted him in spite of it — because of it. Together they rudely colonized the upstairs at the Cottage, running back to the dorms only for indispensable personal items, and letting it be known that trespassers would be exposed to displays of mutual affection, verbal and otherwise, and the sight of their scattered underthings.

That wasn’t the only miraculous event that summer. Astoundingly, the three older Physical Kids had graduated from Brakebills. Even Josh, with his lousy grades. The official ceremony would happen in another week; it was a private affair to which the rest of the school was not invited. By tradition they would be allowed to stay at Brakebills for the rest of the summer, but after that they would be ushered out into the world.

Quentin was stunned by this turn of events. They all were. It was hard to imagine life at Brakebills without them; it was hard for Quentin to imagine life after Brakebills at all. There hadn’t been much discussion of what they were going to do next, or at least not around Quentin.

It wasn’t necessarily a cause for alarm. The passage from Brakebills to the outside world was a well-traveled one. There was an extensive network of magicians operating in the wider world, and, being magicians, they were in no danger of starving. They could do more or less whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t interfere with one another. The real problem was figuring out to their own satisfaction what that was. Some of the student body went into public service — quietly promoting the success of humanitarian causes, or subtly propping up the balance of various failing ecosystems, or participating in the governance of magical society, such as it was. A lot of people just traveled, or created magical artworks, or staged elaborate sorcerous war games. Others went into research: many magical schools (although not Brakebills) offered programs of post-graduate study, with various advanced degrees conferred at the end. Some students even chose to matriculate at a regular, nonmagical university. The application of conventional science, chemistry especially, to magical techniques was a hot field. Who knew what exotic spells you could create using the new trans uranic elements?

“I was thinking of trying to talk to the Thames dragon about it,” Eliot said airily one afternoon. They were sitting on the floor in the library. It was too hot for chairs.

“The who?” Quentin said.

“You think he would see you?” Josh asked.

“You never know till you ask.”

“Wait a minute,” Quentin said. “Who or what is the Thames dragon?”

“The Thames dragon,” Eliot said. “You know. The dragon who lives in the Thames. I’m sure he has another name, a dragon name, but I doubt we could pronounce it.”

“What are you saying.” Quentin looked around for help. “An actual dragon? Are you saying there are real dragons?” He hadn’t quite reached the point where he always knew when he was being made fun of.

“Come on, Quentin,” Janet scoffed. They’d gotten to the part of Push where they flipped cards across the room into a hat. They were using a mixing bowl from the kitchen.

“I’m not kidding.”

“You really don’t know? Didn’t you read the McCabe?” Alice looked at him incredulously. “It was in Meerck’s class.”

“No, I did not read the McCabe,” Quentin said. He didn’t know whether to be angry or excited. “You could have just told me there were real dragons.”

She sniffed. “It never came up.”

Apparently there really were such things as dragons, though they were rare, and most of them were water dragons, solitary creatures who rarely broke the surface and spent a lot of their time asleep, buried in river mud. There was one — no more — in each of the world’s major rivers, and being smart and practically immortal, they tended to stash away all kinds of odd bits of wisdom. The Thames dragon was not as sociable as the Ganges dragon, the Mississippi dragon, or the Neva dragon, but it was said to be much smarter and more interesting. The Hudson River had a dragon of its own — it spent most of its time curled up in a deep, shadowy eddy less than a mile from the Brakebills boathouse. It hadn’t been seen for almost a century. The largest and oldest known dragon was a colossal white who lived coiled up inside a huge freshwater aquifer under the Antarctic ice cap, and who had never once in recorded history spoken to anyone, not even its own kind.

“But you really think the Thames dragon is going to give you free career advice?” Josh said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eliot said. “Dragons are so weird about these things. You want to ask them deep, profound questions, like where does magic come from, or are there aliens, or what are the next ten Mersenne primes, and half the time they just want to play Chinese checkers.”

“I love Chinese checkers!” Janet said.

“Well, okay, maybe you should go talk to the Thames dragon,” Eliot said irritably.

“Maybe I will,” she said happily. “I think we’d have a lot to talk about.”

Quentin felt like all the Physical Kids were falling in love with each other, not just him and Alice, or at least with who they were when they were around each other. In the mornings they slept late. In the afternoons they played pool and boated on the Hudson and interpreted each other’s dreams and debated meaningless points of magical technique. They discussed the varying intensities and timbres of their hangovers. There was an ongoing competition, hotly contested, as to who could make the single most boring observation.

Josh was teaching himself to play the rinky-tink upright piano in the upstairs hallway, and they lay on the grass and listened to his halting rendition of “Heart and Soul,” over and over and over again. It should have been annoying, but somehow it wasn’t.

By this point they had thoroughly co-opted the butler, Chambers, who regularly furnished them with extra-special bottles from the Brakebills cellars, which were overcrowded anyway and needed to be drunk up. Eliot was the only one with any real sophistication in oenological matters, and he tried to teach the rest of them, but Quentin’s tolerance was low, and he refused to spit as a matter of principle, so he just ended up getting drunk every night and forgetting whatever he was supposed to be learning and starting over from scratch the next night. Every morning when he woke up it seemed impossible that he could ever consume another drop of alcohol, but that conviction had always evaporated by five o’clock in the afternoon.

EMILY GREENSTREET

One afternoon all five of them were sitting cross-legged in a circle in the vast empty middle of the Sea. It was a baking hot summer day, and they had gone out there with the intention of attempting a ridiculously elaborate piece of collaborative magic, a five-person spell that, if it worked, would sharpen their vision and hearing and increase their physical strength for a couple of hours. It was Viking magic, battlefield magic designed for a raiding party, and as far as any of them knew it hadn’t been tried in roughly a millennium. Josh, who was directing their efforts, confessed that he wasn’t completely sure it had ever worked in the first place. Those Viking shamans did a lot of for empty boasting.

They had started drinking early, over lunch. Even though Josh said everything was ready at noon — done deal, good to go, let’s hook it up — by the time he actually gave them their handouts, spiral-ring pages of Old Norse chants scratched out in ballpoint in Josh’s neat, tiny runic script, and prepared the ground by pouring out a weaving, branching knot in black sand on the grass, it was almost four. There was singing involved, and neither Janet nor Quentin could carry a tune, and they kept cracking each other up and having to start over.

Finally they got all the way through it, and they sat around staring at the grass and the sky and the backs of their hands and the clock tower in the distance, trying to tell if anything was different. Quentin jogged to the edge of the forest to pee, and when he got back Janet was talking about somebody named Emily Greenstreet.

“Don’t tell me you knew her,” Eliot said.

“I didn’t. But remember I roomed with that cow Emma Curtis during First Year? I was talking to her cousin last week when I was home, she lives near my parents in L.A. She was here then. Told me the whole story.”

“Really.”

“And now you’re going to tell us,” Josh said.

“It’s all a big secret, though. You can’t tell anybody.”

“Emma wasn’t a cow,” Josh said. “Or if she was she was a hot cow. She’s like one of those wagyu cows. Did she ever pay you back for that dress she threw up on?” He was lying on his back, staring up into the cloudless sky. He didn’t seem to care if the spell had worked or not.

“No, she didn’t. And now she’s gone to Tajikistan or something to save the vanishing Asiatic grasshopper. Or something. Cow.”

“Who’s Emily Greenstreet?” Alice asked.

“Emily Greenstreet,” Janet said grandly, savoring the rich, satisfying piece of gossip she was about to impart, “was the first person to leave Brakebills voluntarily in one hundred fifty years.”

Her words floated up and drifted away like cigarette smoke in the warm summer air. It was hot out in the middle of the Sea, with no shade, but they were all too lazy to move.

“She came to Brakebills about eight years ago. I think she was from Connecticut, but not fancy Connecticut, with the money and the Kennedy cousins and the Lyme disease. I think she was from New Haven, or Bridgeport. She was quiet, sort of mousy-looking—”

“How do you know she was mousy-looking?” Josh asked.

“Sh!” Alice whacked Josh on the arm. “Don’t antagonize her. I want to hear the story.” They were all lying on a stripy blanket spread out over the ruins of Josh’s sand pattern.

“I know because Emma’s cousin told me. Anyway, it’s my story, and if I say she was mousy, then she had a tail and she lived on Swiss fucking cheese.

“Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I’m being mean. But you know, they’re just sort of at the edge of everything.

“She was a good student. She kept busy and got by in her boring little way until her Third Year, when she finally distinguished herself by falling in love with one of her professors.

“Everybody does it, of course. Or at least the girls do, since we all have daddy complexes. But usually it’s just a crush, and we get over it and move on to some loser guy our own age. But not our Emily. She was deeply, passionately, delusionally in love. Wuthering Heights love. She stood outside his window at night. She drew little pictures of him in class. She looked at the moon and cried. She drew little pictures of the moon in class and cried at them.

“She become moody and depressed. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus in the original whatever. Her eyes became interestingly pouchy and sunken. She started hanging out at Woof.”

All groaned. Woof was a fountain in the Maze; its official name was Van Pelt, after an eighteenth-century Dean, but it depicted Romulus and Remus suckling from a she-wolf with many dangling wolf-boobs, hence Woof. It was the chosen hangout of the goths and the artsy crowd.

“Now she had a Secret, capital S, and ironically it made her more attractive to people, because they wanted to know what her Secret was. And sure enough, before long a boy, some deeply unfortunate boy, fell in love with her.

“She didn’t love this boy back, since she was savin’ all her lovin’ for Professor Sexyman, but he made her feel pretty damn good, since nobody had ever been in love with her before. She strung him along and flirted with him in public in the hope that it would make her real love interest jealous.

“Now we turn to the third point in our little triangle of love. By all rights the professor should have been completely impervious to our Emily’s charms. He should have had an avuncular little chuckle over it in the Senior Common Room and then forgotten about it. She wasn’t even that hot. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis, maybe he thought a liaison with Ms. Greenstreet could restore to him some of his long-vanished youth. Who knows. He was married, too, the idiot.

“We’ll never know exactly what happened or how far it went, except that it went too far, and then Professor Sexyman came to his senses, or got what he wanted, and he called it off.

“Needless to say our Emily became even gothier and weepier and more like a Gorey drawing than she already was, and her boy became even more besotted and brought her presents and flowers and was Supportive.

“Maybe you knew this, I don’t know, I didn’t, but Woof used to be different from the other fountains. That’s why the doomers started hanging out there in the first place. You wouldn’t notice what was off about it, at first, but after a while you’d realize that when you looked into it, you wouldn’t see your own reflection, just empty sky. And maybe if the sky was cloudy on that particular day, the sky in the fountain would be blue, or the other way around. It definitely wasn’t a normal reflection. And every once in a while you’d look into it and you’d see other faces looking up at you, looking puzzled, as if they were looking into some other fountain somewhere else and were weirded out because they were seeing your face and not their own. Somebody must have figured out a way to switch the reflections in two fountains, but who did it and why, and how, and why the Dean didn’t change them back, I have no idea.

“You have to wonder, too, if it was more than just the reflections — if you could dive down into one pool and come up in the other one, in this world or some other world. There’s always been something off about those fountains. Did you know they were here before Brakebills? They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around. Or that’s what people say.”

Eliot snorted.

“Well that’s what people say, darling. Anyway,” Janet went on, “the thing is, Emily started spending a lot of time at Woof, just smoking and hanging out, and I guess mooning over her little affair. She spent so much time there that she started to recognize one of the faces in the fountain. Somebody like her, who was spending a lot of time at the other fountain, the one in the reflection. Let’s call her Doris. After a while Emily and Doris got to noticing each other. They’d acknowledge each other, a little wave, you know, just to be polite. Probably Doris was a little mopey, too. They got to feeling like kindred spirits.

“Emily and Doris worked out a way to communicate. Again, the exact details have eluded your intrepid correspondent. Maybe they held up signs or something. They must have had to be in mirror writing, to make sense as reflections, or am I getting that wrong?

“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived, maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily, maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris, maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it?”

A chill settled over the group, where they lay on the sun-warm turf. Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were — your soul, for lack of a better word — made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable. When Quentin had first gotten to Brakebills, he’d wondered why everybody didn’t just make themselves ridiculously good-looking. He’d looked at the kids with an obviously flawed feature — like Gretchen with her leg, or Eliot with his twisted jaw — and wondered why they didn’t get somebody to fix them up, like Hermione with her teeth in Harry Potter. But in reality it always ended in disaster.

“Poor Emily,” Janet said. “When she took down the spell that Doris taught her through the fountain, she actually thought she’d found it, the secret technique everybody else had missed. It was elaborate and costly, but it really looked like it might work. After a few weeks of laying the groundwork, she put it together one night by herself in her room.

“How do you think she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw what she’d done to herself?” You could almost hear a note of genuine sympathy in Janet’s hard voice. “I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”

It was late enough in the afternoon now that the shadows from the forest had almost stretched out from the western edge of the Sea far enough to lap at the edge of their blanket.

“Must have been she could still talk, because she got word to her boy that she was in trouble, and he came to her room, and after much preliminary whispering through the keyhole she let him in. And we have to give our boy credit. It must have been bad, very bad, but he stuck by her. She wouldn’t let him go to the faculty — Dunleavy was still Dean, and she would have kicked Emily out without thinking about it.

“So he told her to stay there, don’t move, don’t do anything to make it worse, he would go to the library and see what he could find.

“He came back just before dawn, thinking he had it pretty much worked out. You can imagine the scene. They’d both been up all night. They’re sitting cross-legged on her little bed, her with her scrambled head, him with about eight books open around him on the covers. He’s mixed up a few reagents in cereal bowls from the dining hall. She’s leaning what’s left of her forehead against the wall, trying to keep cool. The blue in the window is getting brighter and brighter, they’ve got to take care of this soon. She’d probably gone past panic and regret at this point. But not past hope.

“But then think about his state of mind. In a way, for him, it was the perfect thing to have happen. This is his golden moment, his chance to be the hero, to save her and win her love, or at least some pity sex. It’s his chance to be strong for her, which is the only thing he’s ever wanted to do.

“But I don’t know, I think he’d had enough time at this point, maybe he’d figured out what was really going on. I’m guessing the dime had finally dropped. She’d taken a terrible chance, and he had to know she hadn’t done it for him.

“Either way he was in no shape to be doing major wizardry. He was tired and scared and in over his head, and I think his heart must have been broken a little, too. Maybe he just wanted it too badly. He launched into the repair spell, which I happen to know which one it was, it was from the Major Arcana, Renaissance stuff. Big energies. It got away from him in the worst possible way. It took him over, took his body away. Right in front of her eyes, he burned up screaming. Blue fire. He became a niffin.”

That’s what Fogg was talking about that night in the infirmary, Quentin thought. About losing control. Apparently the others knew what the word meant, niffin. They stared at Janet like they’d been turned to stone.

“Well. Emily freaked out, I mean freaked out. Barricaded the door, wouldn’t let anybody in until her beloved professor himself showed up. By that point the whole school was awake. I can only imagine how he felt, since in a way the whole thing was his fault. He can’t have been too proud of himself. I suppose he would have had to try to banish the niffin if it didn’t want to leave. I don’t know if even he could have. I don’t think those things really have an upper limit.

“Anyway, he kept his head, kept everybody else out of the room. He put her face back, right there on the spot, which cannot have been easy. Whatever else he was he must have been some magician, because that spell that came through the fountain, that was a nasty piece of work. And she probably twisted it up even more in the casting, too. But he parsed it on the fly and made her reasonably presentable, though I hear she’s never been quite the way she was. Not like she’s deformed or anything, just different. Probably if you hadn’t met her you would never know.

“And that’s pretty much it. I can’t even imagine what they told the boy’s parents. I hear he was from a magical family, so they probably got some version of the truth. But, you know, the clean version.”

There was a long silence. A bell was clanging far away, a boat on the river. The shadow from the trees had flooded all the way over them, deliciously cool in the late-summer afternoon.

Alice cleared her throat. “What happened to the professor?”

“You haven’t figured it out?” Janet didn’t bother to conceal her glee. “They gave him a choice: resign in disgrace… or transfer to Antarctica. Brakebills South. Guess which one he took.”

“Oh my God,” Josh said. “It was Mayakovsky.”

“That explains a hell of a lot,” Quentin said.

“Doesn’t it though? Doesn’t it just?”

“So what happened to Emily Greenstreet?” Alice asked. “She just left school?” There was a trace of ground steel in her voice. Quentin wasn’t totally sure where it was coming from. “What happened to her? Did they send her to a normal school?”

“I hear she does something businessy in Manhattan,” Janet said. “They set her up with an easy corporate job, I don’t know, management consulting or something. We own part of some big firm. Lots of magic to cover up the fact that she doesn’t do anything. She just sits in an office and surfs the Web all day. I think part of her just didn’t survive what happened, you know?”

After that even Janet stopped talking. Quentin let himself drift among the clouds. He felt spinny from the wine, like the Earth had come untightened and was wobbling loose on its gimbaled base. Apparently he wasn’t the only one, because when Josh stood up after a few minutes he immediately lost his balance and fell over again on the turf. There was scattered applause.

But then he stood up again, steadied himself, did a slow, deep knee bend, and executed a perfect standing backflip. He stuck the landing and straightened up, beaming.

“It worked,” he said. “I can’t believe it. I take back everything bad I ever said about Viking shamans! It fucking worked!”

The spell had worked, though for some reason Josh was the only one who got anything out of it. As they picked up the picnic things and shook the sand out of the blanket, Josh did laps around the field, whooping and making huge superhero leaps in the fading light.

“I am a Viking warrior! Cower before my might! Cower! The strength of Thor and all his mighty hosts flows through me! And I fucked your mother! I… fucked… your… motherrrrrrrrrr!”

“He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”

Eventually Josh disappeared in search of other people to show off to, loudly singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Janet and Eliot straggled off in the direction of the Cottage, Alice and Quentin toward the House, sunburnt and sleepy and still half drunk. Quentin had already made up his mind to nap through dinner.

“He’s going to hurt somebody,” he said. “Probably himself.”

“There’s some damage resistance built in. Strengthening the skin and the skeleton. He could put his fist through a wall and probably not break anything.”

“Probably. If he can, he will.”

Alice was even more quiet than usual. It wasn’t until they were deep in the twilight alleys of the Maze that Quentin saw that her face was slick with tears. His heart went cold.

“Alice. Alice, sweetheart.” He stopped and turned her to face him. “What is it?”

She pressed her face miserably into his shoulder.

“Why did she have to tell that story?” she said. “Why? Why is she like that?”

Quentin immediately felt guilty for having enjoyed it. It was a horrible story. But there was something irresistibly gothic about it, too.

“She’s just a gossip,” he said. “She doesn’t mean anything.”

“Doesn’t she?” She pulled back, fiercely wiping her tears with the backs of her hands. “Doesn’t she? I always thought my brother died in a car crash.”

“Your brother?” Quentin froze. “I don’t understand.”

“He was eight years older than me. My parents told me he died in a car crash. But that was him, I’m sure it was.”

“I don’t understand. You think he was that boy in the story?”

She nodded. “I think he was. I know he was.” Her eyes were red and rubbed with rage and hurt.

“Jesus. Look, it’s just a story. There’s no way she could know.”

“She knows.” Alice kept walking. “It all works out, the timing of it. And he was like that. Charlie — he was always falling in love with people. He would have tried to save her himself. He would have done that.” She shook her head bitterly. “He was stupid that way.”

“Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe Janet didn’t realize it was him.”

“That’s what she wants everybody to think! So you won’t realize what a howling cunt she is!”

Howling was a big word at Brakebills that year. Quentin was about to keep defending Janet when something else clicked.

“That’s why you weren’t Invited here,” he said quietly. “It has to be. Because of what happened to your brother.”

She nodded, her eyes unfocused now, her relentless brain chewing away at this wrinkle, fitting other things into the bleak new picture it created.

“They didn’t want anything to happen to me. As if it would. God, why is everybody else in the world but us so fucking stupid?”

They stopped a few yards short of the edge of the Maze, in the deep shadow that pooled where the hedges grew close together, as if they couldn’t face the daylight again, not quite yet.

“At least now I know,” she said. “But why did she tell that story, Q? She knew it would hurt me. Why would she do that?”

He shook his head. The idea of conflict within their little clique made him uncomfortable. He wanted to explain it away. He wanted everything to be perfect.

“She’s just bitter,” he said finally, “because you’re the pretty one.”

Alice snorted.

“She’s bitter because we’re happy,” she said, “and she’s in love with Eliot. Always has been. And he doesn’t love her.”

She started walking again.

“What? Wait.” Quentin shook his head, as if that would make all the pieces fit together again. “Why would she want Eliot?”

“Because she can’t have him?” Alice said bitterly, without looking back at him. “And she has to have everything? I’m surprised she hasn’t come after you. What, you think she hasn’t slept with Josh?”

They left the Maze and climbed the stairs to the rear terrace, lit by the yellow light coming through the French doors and littered with premature autumn leaves. Alice cleaned herself up as best she could with the heels of her hands. She didn’t wear much makeup anyway. Quentin stood by and silently handed her tissues to blow her nose with, adrift in his own thoughts. It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.

FIFTH YEAR

Then September came, and it was just Quentin and Alice. The others were gone, in a swirl of falling leaves and a crackle of early frost.

It was a shock to see them go, but along with the shock, mixed in with it like the liquor in a cocktail, was an even greater feeling of relief. Quentin wanted things to be good between them, to be better than good, to be perfect. But perfection is a nervy business, because the moment you spot the tiniest flaw it’s ruined. Perfection was part of Quentin’s mythology of Brakebills, the story he told himself about his life there, a narrative as carefully constructed and reverently maintained as Fillory and Further, and he wanted to be able not just to tell it to himself but to believe it. That had been getting progressively more difficult. Pressure was building up in some subterranean holding tank, and right at the end there things had begun to come apart. Even Quentin, with his almost limitless capacity for ignoring the obvious, had begun to pick up on it. Maybe Alice was right, maybe Janet really did hate her and love Eliot. Maybe it was something else, something so glaringly obvious that Quentin couldn’t stand to look at it directly. One way or another the bonds that held them together were starting to fray, they were losing their magical ability to effortlessly love one another. Now, even though things would never be the same, even though they’d never be together in the same way, at least he could always remember it the way he wanted to. The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.

As soon as the semester began Quentin did something he had already put off for much too long: he went to Dean Fogg and told him what had happened to Julia. Fogg just frowned and told him he’d take care of it. Quentin wanted to climb across the desk and grab Fogg by his natty lapels for what he’d done to her by screwing up the memory spells. He tried to explain to Fogg that he had made Julia suffer in a way that nobody should ever have to suffer. Fogg just watched, neither moved nor unmoved. In the end the best Quentin could do was to make him promise that he would strain whatever the applicable regulations were to the breaking point to make things easier for her. It was all he could think of. He left Fogg’s office feeling exactly as bad as he had when he entered it.

Sitting at dinner, or strolling between classes through the dusty hallways full of sideways afternoon light, Quentin began to realize for the first time how cut off from the rest of the school he and Alice had been for the past two years, and how few of the other students he really knew. All the groups were cliques unto themselves, but the Physical Kids had been especially tight, and now he and Alice were all that was left of them. He still had classes with the other Fifth Years, and he chatted with them in a friendly way, but he knew that their loyalties and their attention were elsewhere.

“I bet they think we’re horrible snobs,” Alice said one day. “The way we keep to ourselves.”

They were sitting on the cool stone rim of the fountain known as Sammy, a knockoff of the Laocoön in Rome, serpents strangling the renegade priest and his sons, but with water squirting cheerfully out of everybody’s mouths. They had come out to try a piece of messy domestic magic for removing stains from a skirt of Alice’s, that was best performed outdoors, but they’d forgotten a key ingredient, turmeric, and weren’t ready to face the walk back yet. It was a beautiful fall Saturday morning, or really it was closer to noon, the temperature balanced precariously on the tipping point between warm and chilly.

“You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“No, you’re probably right.” He sighed. “They probably do. Uncharitable bastards. They’re the snobs.”

Alice tossed an acorn overhand at the fountain. It ticked off one of the dying priest’s sturdy knees and into the water.

“Do you think we are? Snobs, I mean?” Quentin asked.

“I don’t know. Not necessarily. No, I don’t think we are. We have nothing against them.”

“Exactly. Some of them are perfectly fine.”

“Some of them we hold in the highest esteem.”

“Exactly.” Quentin dabbled his fingertips in the water. “So what are you saying? We should go out and make friends?”

She shrugged. “They’re the only other magicians our age on the continent. They’re the only peers we’ll ever have.”

The sky was burning blue, and the tree branches stood out sharply against it in the clear, shivering reflection in the fountain.

“Okay,” Quentin said. “But not with all of them.”

“Well, God no. We’ll be discriminating. Anyway, who even knows if they’ll want to be friends with us?”

“Right. So who?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters, Vix,” Quentin said. “It’s not like they’re all the same.” “Vix” was a term of endearment with them, short for vixen, an allusion to their Antarctic interlude, vixen being the word for a female fox.

“So who?”

“Surendra.”

“Okay. Sure. Or no, he’s going out with that horrible Second Year. You know, with the teeth. She’s always trying to make people do madrigals after dinner. What about Georgia?”

“Maybe we’re overthinking this. We can’t force it. We’ll just let it happen naturally.”

“Okay.” Quentin watched her study her nails with her intense, birdlike focus. Sometimes she looked so beautiful he couldn’t believe she had anything to do with him. He could barely believe she existed at all.

“But you have to do it,” she said. “If it’s me, nothing’s going to happen. You know I’m pathetic at that kind of thing.”

“I know.”

She threw an acorn at him.

“You weren’t supposed to agree.”

And so, with a concerted effort, they roused themselves from their stupor and embarked on a belated campaign to socialize with the rest of their class, most of whom they’d drifted almost completely out of touch with. In the end it wasn’t Surendra or Georgia but Gretchen — the blond girl who walked with a cane — who turned out to be the key. It helped that Alice and Gretchen were both prefects, which was a source of both pride and embarrassment to them. The position carried with it almost no official duties; mostly it was just yet another absurd, infantilizing idea borrowed from the English public school system, a symptom of the Anglophilia that was embedded so deeply in the institutional DNA of Brakebills. Prefectships were given to the four students in the Fourth and Fifth Years with the highest GPA, who then got (or had) to wear a silver pin in the shape of a bee on their jackets. Their actual responsibilities were petty things like regulating access to the single phone on campus, an obsolete rotary monster hidden away in a battle-scarred wooden phone booth that was itself tucked away under a back staircase, which always had a line a dozen students long. In return they had access to the Prefects’ Common Room, a special locked lounge on the east side of the House with a high, handsome arched window and a cabinet that was always stocked with sticky-sweet sherry that Quentin and Alice forced themselves to drink.

The Prefects’ Common Room was also an excellent place to have sex in, as long as they could square it with the other prefects in advance, but that usually wasn’t a problem. Gretchen was sympathetic, since she had a boyfriend of her own, and the third prefect was a popular girl with spiky blond hair named Beatrice, whom nobody had even realized was especially smart before she was named a prefect. She never used the room anyway. The only real trick was avoiding the fourth prefect, because the fourth prefect was, of all people, Penny.

The announcement that Penny was a prefect was so universally, gobsmackingly surprising that nobody talked about anything else for the rest of the day. Quentin had barely spoken to Penny since their infamous altercation, not that he’d gone looking for him. From that day on Penny had become a loner, a ghost, which was not an easy thing to be at a school as small as Brakebills, but he had a talent for it. He walked quickly between classes with a flat, frozen stare on his round frying-pan face, bolted his food at mealtimes, went on long solitary rambles, stayed in his room in the afternoons after class, went to bed early, got up at dawn.

What else he did, nobody knew. When the Brakebills students were sorted into groups by Discipline at the end of second year, Penny wasn’t assigned to a group at all. The rumor was that he had tested into a Discipline so arcane and outlandish it couldn’t be classified according to any of the conventional schemes. Whether it was true or not, next to his name on the official list Fogg had simply put the word INDEPENDENT. He rarely turned up in class after that, and when he did he lurked silently in the back of the room with his hands shoved in the pockets of his fraying Brakebills blazer, never asking questions, never taking notes. He had an air of knowing things other people didn’t. He was sometimes seen in the company of Professor Van der Weghe, under whose guidance he was rumored to be pursuing an intensive independent study.

The Prefects’ Common Room was an increasingly important refuge for Quentin and Alice because their old sanctuary, the Cottage, was no longer sacrosanct. Quentin had never really thought about it, but it was pure chance that last year nobody new had been placed in the Physical group, thus preserving the integrity of their little clique. But the drought was bound to come to an end, and it did. At the end of the previous semester no fewer than four rising Third Years had tested into Physical, and now, although it seemed wrong in every possible way, they had as much right to the Cottage as Quentin and Alice did.

They did their best to be good sports about it. On the first day of classes they sat patiently in the library as the new Physical Kids went through the ritual and broke into the Cottage. They’d debated long and earnestly about what to serve the newcomers when they came in, finally settling on a goodish champagne and — not wanting to be selfish, even though that was exactly how they felt — an obscenely expensive array of oysters and caviar with toast points and crème fraîche.

“Cool!” the new Physical Kids said, one after the other, as they made their way inside. They goggled at the oversize interior. They inspected the bric-a-brac and the piano and the cabinet of alphabetized twigs. They looked impossibly young. Quentin and Alice made small talk with them, trying to be witty and knowing, the way they remembered the others having been when they first got there.

Sitting in a row on the couch, the Third Years squirmed and sipped their champagne too quickly, like children waiting to be excused. They asked polite questions about the paintings and the Cottage library. Do the books circulate outside the building? Did they really have a first-edition Abecedarian Arcana in the hand of Pseudo-Dionysius himself? Really. And when was the Cottage first constructed? Really! Wow. That’s old. That’s, like, ancient.

Then, after a suitable interval, they disappeared en masse into the pool room. They showed no particular desire to be chaperoned there, and Quentin and Alice had no particular desire ever to see them again, so they stayed where they were. As the evening wore on, the sounds of adolescent bonding could be heard. It became apparent to Quentin and Alice that they were relics of an earlier era that had worn out its welcome. They had come full circle. They were outsiders again.

“I feel like an elderly docent,” Quentin said.

“I already forget their names,” Alice said. “They’re like quadruplets.”

“We should give them numbers. Tell them it’s a tradition.”

“And then we could always call them by the wrong number. Freak them out. Or we could call them all the same thing. Alfred or something.”

“Even the girls?”

“Especially the girls.”

They were sipping tepid leftover champagne. They were getting drunk, but Quentin didn’t care. From the pool room came the glittery tinkle of breaking glass — a champagne flute, probably — and then, a little later, the sound of a sash being raised and somebody throwing up, hopefully out the window.

“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”

“We should have burned this place down,” Alice said gloomily. They were definitely drunk. “Been the last ones out the door and then torched it.”

“Then walked away with it burning behind us in the background, like in a movie.”

“End of an era. End of an epoch. Which one? Era or epoch? What’s the difference?”

Quentin didn’t know. They would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn’t stay here anymore. Couldn’t go back. Only forward.

“Do you think we were ever like this?” Quentin asked. “Like these kids?”

“Probably. I bet we were even worse. I don’t know how the others put up with us.”

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re right. God, they were so much nicer than we are.”

That winter Quentin didn’t go home for the holidays. Around Christmas-time — real-world Christmas — he’d had the usual conversation with his parents about Brakebills’ unusual schedule, which he had to remind them about every year, lounging inside the old phone booth under the back stairs with one foot braced up against the folding wooden door. Then by the time Brakebills-calendar Christmas rolled around, it was already March in the real world, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal not to go back. If they had asked him — if they’d put it out there for an instant that they were eager to see him, or that they would be disappointed if he didn’t come — he might have caved. He would have, in a second. But they were their usual blithe, oblivious, glassine selves. And besides, he got an independent feeling from coolly informing them that he had other plans, thanks very much.

Instead Quentin went home with Alice. It was her idea, though as it got closer to the holidays Quentin wasn’t exactly sure why she’d invited him, since the prospect obviously made her suicidally uncomfortable.

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” she said when he asked her. “It just seemed like the kind of things boyfriends and girlfriends do!”

“Well, whatever, I don’t have to come. I’ll just stay here. Just say I had a paper to finish or something. I’ll see you in January.”

“But don’t you want to come?” she wailed.

“Of course I do. I want to see where you come from. I want your parents to know who I am. And God knows I’m not taking you back to my parents’ house.”

“All right.” She didn’t sound any less anxious. “Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.”

The opening of the portals home for vacation was always a complicated and tedious procedure that inevitably led to huge numbers of Brakebillians backed up with all their luggage in a ragged line that wound down the dark, narrow corridor leading to the main living room, where Professor Van der Weghe was in charge of getting people where they needed to go. Everybody was relieved that exams were over, and there was always a lot of giddy pushing and shoving and shrieking and casting of minor pyrotechnic spells. Quentin and Alice waited together in silence with their packed bags, solemnly, side by side, Quentin looking as respectable as he could manage. He hardly had any clothes anymore that weren’t part of his Brakebills uniform.

He knew Alice was from Illinois, and he knew Illinois was in the Midwest, but he couldn’t have pointed to the precise location of that state within a thousand miles. Apart from a European vacation in junior high he’d barely ever been off the East Coast, and his Brakebills education hadn’t done much to improve his grasp of American geography. And as it turned out he hardly saw Illinois anyway, or at least not its exterior.

Professor Van der Weghe set up the portal to open directly into an anteroom inside Alice’s parents’ house. Stone walls, flat mosaic floors, post-and-lintel doorways on all sides. It was a precise re-creation of a traditional bourgeois Roman residence. Sound echoed in it like a church. It was like stepping past the red velvet rope at a museum. Magic tended to run in families — Quentin was an exception in that respect — and Alice’s parents were both magicians. She had never had to sneak around behind their backs the way he had to with his parents.

“Welcome to the house that time forgot to forget,” Alice said sulkily, kicking her bags into a corner. She led him by the hand along an alarmingly long, dark corridor to a sunken living room with cushions and hard Roman-style couches strewn around at careless angles and a modest plashing fountain in the middle.

“Daddy changes it all around every few years,” she explained. “He mostly does architectural magic. When I was little it was all Baroque, gold knobs on everything. That was almost nice. But then it was Japanese paper screens — you could hear everything. Then it was Fallingwater — Frank Lloyd Wright — until Mom got sick of living in a mildew farm for some reason. And then for a while it was just a big old Iroquois longhouse with a dirt floor. No walls. That was hilarious. We had to beg him to put in a real bathroom. I think he seriously thought we were going to watch him defecate into a pit. I doubt even the Indians did that.”

With that she sat down heavily on a hard leather Roman couch, opened a book, and became absorbed in her vacation reading.

Quentin understood that it was sometimes better to wait out Alice’s black periods than to try to coax her out of them. Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home. So he spent the next hour wandering around what looked remarkably like an upper-middle-class Pompeian household, complete with pornographic frescoes. It was obsessively authentic except for the bathrooms — a concession had obviously been granted on that score. Even dinner, when it arrived, served by a squad of three-foot-tall animated wooden marionettes who made little click-clacking noises as they walked, was revoltingly historical: calf brains, parrot tongues, a roasted moray eel, all peppered beyond the point of edibility, just in case they weren’t inedible to begin with. Fortunately, there was plenty of wine.

They had progressed to the third course, the stuffed and roasted uterus of a sow, when a short, portly, round-faced man suddenly appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a well-worn toga the gray of unlaundered bedsheets. He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his dark stubble extended well down his neck, and what hair he had left on his head could have used cutting.

“Ave atque vales!” he proclaimed. He gave an elaborate, made-up-looking Roman salute, which was essentially the same as a Nazi salute. “Welcome to the domus of Danielus!”

He made a face that implied that it was other people’s fault that the joke wasn’t funny.

“Hi Dad,” Alice said. “Dad, this is my friend Quentin.”

“Hi.” Quentin stood up. He’d been trying to eat reclining, Roman-style, but it was harder than it looked, and he had a stitch in his side. Alice’s father shook his outstretched hand. He seemed to forget he was doing it halfway through, then looked surprised to find a fleshy alien extremity still in his grip.

“Are you really eating that stuff? I had Domino’s an hour ago.”

“We didn’t know there was anything else. Where’s Mom?”

“Who knows?” Alice’s father said. He bugged his eyes out like it was a wacky mystery. “She was working on one of her compositions downstairs, last I saw.”

He jogged the few steps down into the room, sandals slapping the stone tiles, and served himself some wine from a decanter.

“And that was when? November?”

“Don’t ask me. I lose track of time in this damn place.”

“Why don’t you put in some windows, Daddy? It’s so dark in here.”

“Windows?” He bugged out his eyes again; it appeared to be his signature facial expression. “You speak of some barbarian magic of which we noble Romans know nothing!”

“You’ve done an amazing job here,” Quentin piped up, the soul of obsequiousness. “It looks really authentic.”

“Thank you!” Alice’s father drained the goblet and poured himself another, then sat down heavily on a couch, spilling a purple track of wine down the front of his toga in the process. His bare calves were plump and bone white; black bristles stood straight out from them in static astonishment. Quentin wondered how his beautiful Alice could possibly share a single base pair of genetic information with this person.

“It took me three years to put it together,” he said. “Three years. And you know what? I’m already sick of it after two months. I can’t eat the food, there are skid marks on my toga, and I have plantar fasciitis from walking around on these stone floors. What is the point of my life?” He looked at Quentin furiously, as if he actually expected an answer, as if Quentin were concealing it from him. “Would someone tell me that, please? Because I have no idea! None!”

Alice glared at her father like he’d just killed her pet. Quentin stayed perfectly still, as if that meant that Alice’s father, like a dinosaur, couldn’t see him. They all three sat in awkward silence for a long beat. Then he stood up.

“Gratias—and good night!”

He tossed the train of his toga over his shoulder and strode out of the room. The marionettes’ feet clack-clacked on the stone floor as they mopped up the spilled wine he left behind.

“That’s my dad!” Alice said loudly, and rolled her eyes as if she expected a laugh track to kick in behind her. None did.

In the midst of this domestic wasteland Alice and Quentin established a workable, even comfortable routine for themselves, invaders staking out a safe perimeter deep in hostile territory. It was weirdly liberating to be in the middle of somebody else’s domestic agony — he could see the bad emotional energy radiating out in all directions, sterilizing every available surface with its poisonous particles, but it passed through him harmlessly, like neutrinos. He was like Superman here, he was from off-planet, and that made him immune to any local villainy. But he could see it doing its ruinous work on Alice, and he tried to shield her as best he could. He knew the rules here instinctively, what it meant to have parents who ignored you. The only difference was that his parents did it because they loved each other, Alice’s because they hated each other.

If nothing else the house was quiet and well stocked with Roman-style wine, sweet but perfectly drinkable. It was also reasonably private: he and Alice could share a bedroom without her parents caring or even noticing. And there were the baths: Alice’s dad had excavated huge, cavernous underground Roman baths that they had all to themselves, huge oblong aquifers scooped out of the midwestern tundra. Every morning they would spend a good hour trying to fling each other into the scalding caldarium and the glacial frigidarium, which were equally unbearable, and then soaking naked in the tepidarium.

Over the course of two weeks Quentin glimpsed Alice’s mother exactly once. If anything, she looked even less like Alice than Alice’s father did: she was thin and tall, taller than her husband, with a long, narrow, animated face and a dry bunch of blond-brown hair tied back behind her head. She chattered earnestly to him about the research she was doing on fairy music, which was, she explained, mostly scored for tiny bells and inaudible to human beings. She lectured Quentin for almost an hour, with no prompting on his part, and without once asking him who he was or what exactly he was doing in her house. At one point one of her slight breasts wandered out of the misbuttoned cardigan that she wore with nothing under it; she tucked it back in without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Quentin had the impression that it had been some time since she had spoken to anybody.

“So I’m a little worried about your parents,” Quentin said that afternoon. “I think they might be completely insane.”

They had retreated to Alice’s bedroom, where they lay side by side on her enormous bed in their bathrobes, looking up at the mosaic on the ceiling: Orpheus singing to a ram, an antelope, and an assortment of attentive birds.

“Are they?”

“Alice, I think you know they’re kind of weird.”

“I guess. I mean, I hate them, but they’re my parents. I don’t see them as insane, I see them as sane people who deliberately act like this to torture me. When you say they’re mentally ill, you’re just letting them off the hook. You’re helping them elude prosecution.

“Anyway, I thought you might find them interesting,” she said. “I know how mentally excited you get about anything magical. Well, voila, for your enjoyment, two career magicians.”

He wondered, theoretically, which of them had it worse. Alice’s parents were toxic monsters, but at least you could see it. His own parents were more like vampires or werewolves — they passed for human. He could rave about their atrocities all he wanted, he knew the villagers would never believe him till it was too late.

“At any rate I can see where you get your social skills,” he said.

“My point is, you don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a family of magicians.”

“Well, I didn’t know you had to wear a toga.”

“You don’t have to wear togas. That’s exactly the problem, Q. You don’t have to do anything. This is what you don’t understand! You don’t know any older magicians except our professors. It’s a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. A lot of magicians never find it.”

Her voice was strangely urgent, almost angry. He was trying to catch up to her.

“So you’re saying your parents didn’t.”

“No, they didn’t, despite their having had two children, which would have given them a minimum of two good options. Well, I think they might have cared about Charlie, but when they lost him, they lost their way completely. And here they are.”

“What about your mom and her fairy orchestras? She seems pretty serious about them.”

“That’s just to annoy my dad. I’m not even sure they exist.”

Suddenly Alice rolled over on top of him, straddling him, hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. Her hair hung straight down at him in a shimmering curtain, tickling his face and giving her the very authoritative appearance of a goddess leaning down from the heavens.

“You have to promise me we’ll never be like them, Quentin.” Their noses were almost touching. Her weight on top of him was arousing, but her face was angry and serious. “I know you think it’s going to be all quests and dragons and fighting evil and whatever, like in Fillory. I know that’s what you think. But it’s not. You don’t see it yet. There’s nothing out there.

“So you have to promise me, Quentin. Let’s never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die.”

“Well, you drive a hard bargain,” he said. “But okay. I promise.”

“I’m serious, Quentin. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be so much harder than you think. They don’t even know, Quentin. They think they’re happy. That’s the worst part.”

She undid the drawstring on his pajama bottoms without looking and jerked them down, still staring directly into his eyes. Her robe was already open at the waist, and she had nothing on under it. He knew she was saying something important, but he wasn’t grasping it. He put his hands under her robe, feeling her smooth back, the curve of her waist. Her heavy breasts brushed against his chest. They would always have magic. They would have it forever. So what—?

“Maybe they are happy,” he said. “Maybe this is just who they are.”

“No, Quentin. They aren’t, and it isn’t.” She twined her fingers into his hair and gripped it, hard, so that it hurt. “God, you are such a child sometimes.”

They were moving together now, breathing hard. Quentin was inside her, and they couldn’t talk anymore, except for Alice just repeating:

“Promise me, Q. Promise me. Just promise.”

She said it angrily, insistently, over and over again, as if he were arguing, as if he wouldn’t have agreed to absolutely anything at that moment.

GRADUATION

In a way it was a disaster of a vacation. They hardly even went outside except for a few walks (undertaken at a brisk trot) through the freeze-dried Urbana suburbs, so flat and empty it felt like at any moment they could fall off into the immense white sky. But in other ways it was perfect. It brought Alice and Quentin closer together. It helped Quentin understand why she was the way she was. They didn’t fight once — if anything the terrifying counterexample of Alice’s parents made them feel young and romantic by contrast. And after the first week they’d finished all their homework and were free to lie around and goof off. By the time two weeks were up they were thoroughly stir crazy and ready to start their last semester at Brakebills.

They’d heard almost nothing from the others since last summer. Quentin hadn’t really expected to. Of course he was curious about what was going on in the outside world, but he had the idea that Eliot and Josh and Janet were busy ascending to some inconceivable new level of coolness, as far above Brakebills as Brakebills was above Brooklyn or Chesterton, and he would have felt let down if they’d still had the time and inclination to bother keeping in touch with him.

As far as he could deduce from their scattered reports, they were all living together in an apartment in downtown Manhattan. The only decent correspondent among them was Janet, who every couple of weeks sent the cheesiest I ❤ New York postcard she could find. She wrote in all caps and kept the punctuation to a minimum:

Despite widespread popular resistance, or possibly because of it, Dean Fogg entered Brakebills in an international welters tournament, and Quentin traveled to overseas magic schools for the first time, though he didn’t see much of them beyond the welters court, and once in a while a dining hall. They played in the emerald-green courtyard of a medieval keep in the misty Carpathians, and at a compound bushwhacked out of the seemingly endless Argentine pampas. On Rishiri Island, off the northern coast of Hokkaido, they played on the most beautiful welters court Quentin had ever seen. The sand squares were a searing white and perfectly scraped and leveled. The grass squares were lime green and clipped to a regulation 12 mm. The water squares steamed darkly in the chilly air. Frowning, uncannily humanoid monkeys watched them play, clinging to wiggly pine trees, their bare pink faces ringed with nimbi of snowy-white fur.

But Quentin’s world tour was cut short when, to Professor Fogg’s acute embarrassment, the Brakebills team lost all six of its first six matchups and exited the tournament. Their perfect losing record was preserved forever when they were crushed at home in the first round of the consolation bracket by a pan-European team captained by a tiny, fiery, curly-haired Luxembourgeoise on whom Quentin, along with every other boy on the Brakebills team, and some of the girls, developed an instant crush.

The welters season ended on the last day of March, and suddenly, Quentin found himself staring at the end of his Brakebills career across a perilously slender gap of only two months of time. It was like he’d been wending his way through a vast glittering city, zig-zagging through side streets and wandering through buildings and haunted de Chirico arcades and little hidden piazzas, the whole time thinking that he’d barely scratched the surface, that he was seeing just a tiny sliver of one little neighborhood. And then suddenly he turned a corner and it turned out he’d been through the whole city, it was all behind him, and all that was left was one short street leading straight out of town.

Now the most insignificant things Quentin did felt momentous, brimming over with anticipatory nostalgia. He’d be passing by a window at the back of the House, hurrying between classes, and a tiny movement would catch his eye, a distant figure trudging across the Sea in a Brakebills jacket, or a gawky topiary flamingo fussily shedding the cap of snow on its little green head, and he would realize that he would never see that particular movement ever again, or if he did he would see it in some future time as some unimaginably different person.

And then there were the other moments, when he was violently sick of Brakebills and everything and everyone in it, when it felt lame and pokey and claustrophobic and he was desperate to get out. In four years he’d barely even set foot off the Brakebills campus. My God, he was wearing a school uniform. He’d essentially just spent four extra years in high school! Students had a particular way of speaking at Brakebills, an affected, overly precise, quasi-British diction that came from all those vocal exercises, like they were just freshly back from a Rhodes scholarship and wanted everybody to know it. It made Quentin want to lay about him with an edged weapon. And there was this obsession with naming things. All the rooms at Brakebills had the same identical desk, a broad-shouldered black cherrywood hulk that must have been ordered up in bulk sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was honeycombed with little drawers and cubbies and pigeonholes, and each of those drawers and cubbies and pigeonholes had its own precious little name. Every time Quentin heard somebody drop a reference to “the Ink Chink” and “the Old Dean’s Ear” he rolled his eyes at Alice. Sweet Jesus, are they serious? We have got to get out of this place.

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. The bored, bedraggled specters of Alice’s parents haunted him. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he’d ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn’t Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters.

It made it worse that he was the only one who seemed to be bothered by it. Lots of students were already actively networking with established magical organizations. Surendra lectured anybody who would listen about a consortium of wizards — whom he hadn’t actually heard from yet, but he was pretty sure they’d basically guaranteed him an internship — who spent their time at suborbital altitudes keeping a weather eye out for stray asteroids and oversize solar flares and other potential planetary-scale disasters. Plenty of students went in for academic research. Alice was looking at a post-graduate program in Glasgow, though the idea of being separated didn’t particularly appeal to either of them, nor did the idea of Quentin’s aimlessly tagging along with her to Scotland.

It was considered chic to go undercover, to infiltrate governments and think tanks and NGOs, even the military, in order to get oneself into a position to influence real-world affairs magically from behind the scenes. People devoted years of their lives to it. And there were even more exotic paths. A few magicians — Illusionists in particular — undertook massive art projects, manipulating the northern lights and things like that, decades-long enchantments that might only ever have an audience of one. There was an extensive network of war-gamers who staged annual global conflicts over arbitrary tactical objectives, just for the fun of it, sorcerers against sorcerers, in teams and free-for-all battles royal. They played without safeguards, and it was well known that once in a blue moon someone got killed. But that was half the fun of it, the thrill.

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised — basically guaranteed — a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? He was drowning — why did he recoil whenever anybody reached down to help him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn’t seem concerned at all. They didn’t get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to!

Meanwhile Quentin and Alice plugged away at their mandatory senior theses with steadily diminishing enthusiasm. Alice was attempting to isolate an individual photon and freeze it in place, halting its headlong light-speed flight. She constructed an intricate trap for it out of wood and glass, interwoven with a hellishly complex spherical tangle of glowing indigo gramarye. But in the end nobody was quite sure whether the photon was in there or not, and they couldn’t figure out how to prove it one way or the other. Privately Alice confessed to Quentin that she wasn’t totally sure either, and she was genuinely hoping the faculty could settle it one way or the other, because it was driving her insane. After a week of increasingly fractious debate that settled nothing, they voted to give Alice the lowest possible passing grade and leave it at that.

For his project Quentin planned to fly to the moon and back. Distance-wise he figured he could get there in a couple of days, straight shot, and after his Antarctic adventure he was pretty solid on personal warmth spells. (Though they weren’t his Discipline either. He’d just about given up on his Discipline.) And the idea had a certain Romantic, lyrical savor to it. He took off from the Sea on a bright, hot, humid spring morning, with Alice and Gretchen and a couple of the more sycophantic new Physical Kids to see him off. The protection spells formed a clear bubble around him. Sounds became distorted, and the green lawn and the smiling faces of his well-wishers took on a surreal fish-eye warp. As he rose, the Earth gradually changed from an infinite matte plain below him to a radiant, bounded blue sphere. Overhead the stars came out and became sharper and steelier and less twinkly.

Six hours into the trip his throat suddenly clamped shut, and iron nails stabbed his eardrums. His eyeballs tried to pry themselves out of their sockets. He had drifted off, and his improvised space bubble had started to fail. Quentin waved his arms like a frantic conductor, prestissimo, and the air thickened and warmed again, but by then the fun had gone out of the whole thing. Bouts of shivering and wheezing and nervous laughter rattled him, and he couldn’t calm down. Jesus, he thought, was there ever anything less worth risking his life for than this? God knows how much interstellar radiation he’d already absorbed. Space was full of angry little particles.

He reversed course. He considered hiding out for a few days and just pretending he’d gone to the moon. Maybe he could score some moon dust off Lovelady, present it as evidence. The air got warmer again. The sky grew lighter. He relaxed as a cocktail of relief and shame filled him, one generous part of each. The world spread out again underneath him: the fractally detailed coastline, the blue water textured like beaten metal, the beckoning claw of Cape Cod.

The worst part turned out to be walking into the Great Hall for dinner that night, two days early, with a sheepish yeah-I-fucked-up grin plastered on his face, which was sunburned a flaming red. After dinner he borrowed Alice’s key and retreated to the Prefects’ Common Room, where he drank too much sherry, sipping it alone in front of the darkened window, even though all he could see was his own reflection, picturing the Hudson River moving past in the darkness, sluggish and swollen with cold spring rain. Alice was studying up in her room. Everybody else was asleep except for a lone weeknight party that was racketing on in one wing, spinning off drunk students in pairs and groups. When he was thoroughly smashed on self-pity and alcohol and the dawn was threatening to leap up at him at any moment, Quentin walked gingerly back to his bedroom, climbing the spiral steps past what used to be Eliot’s room. He weaved a little bit, swigging directly from the sherry bottle, which he’d liberated on his way out.

He felt his intoxication already turning into a hangover, that queasy neurological alchemy that usually happens during sleep. His abdomen was overfull, swollen with tainted viscera. People he’d betrayed came wandering out from the place in his mind where they usually stayed. His parents. James. Julia. Professor March. Amanda Orloff. Even old dead Mr. What’s-his-name, his Princeton interviewer. They all watched him dispassionately. He was beneath their contempt.

He lay down on his bed with the light on. Wasn’t there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn’t they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window? He felt the bed slipping down and away, down and away, like a film loop of a Stuka sheering down into an attack run, over and over again. He’d been so young when he first came here. He thought about that freezing day in November when he’d taken the book from the lovely paramedic, and the note had blown away into that dry, twisted, frozen garden, and he’d gone blithely running after it. Now he’d never know what it said. Had it contained all the riches, all the good feeling that he was still somehow missing, even after so much goodness had been heaped upon him? Was it the secret revelation of Martin Chatwin, the boy who had escaped into Fillory and never returned to face the misery of this world? Because he was drunk, he thought about his mother, and how she’d held him once when he was little after he’d lost an action figure down a storm drain, and he smooshed his red, smarting face into his cool pillow and sobbed as if his heart were broken.

By then there were only two weeks left until graduation. Classwork ground to a halt. The Maze was a vivid verdant glowing green knot, the air was full of floaty little motes, and siren-like pleasure craft came drifting down the river past the boathouse, laden with oblivious sunbathers. All anybody talked about was how great it would be when they could party and sleep in and experiment with forbidden spells. They kept looking at each other and laughing and slapping each other on the back and shaking their heads. The carousel was slowing down. The music had almost stopped.

Pranks were organized. A decadent, last-days-of-Pompeii vibe swept through the dorms. Somebody thought up a new game involving dice and a lightly enchanted mirror that was basically a magical version of strip poker. Desperate, ill-advised attempts were made to sleep with that one person with whom one had always secretly, hopelessly wanted to sleep.

The graduation ceremony started at six in the afternoon, with the sky still heavy with fading golden light. An eleven-course banquet was served in the dining hall. The nineteen graduating Fifth Years regarded one another with awe, feeling lost and alone at the long, empty dining table. Red wine was served from bottles without labels; it was made, Fogg revealed, using grapes from Brakebills’ own tiny pocket vineyard, which Quentin had stumbled on in the fall of his First Year. Traditionally the vineyard’s entire output was drunk by the seniors at graduation dinner — had to be drunk, Fogg stressed, hinting darkly at what would happen if a single bottle was left unconsumed. It was a cabernet sauvignon, and it was thin and sour, but they quaffed it lustily anyway. Quentin declaimed a lengthy tribute to its subtle expression of the unique Brakebills terroir. Toasts were drunk to the memory of Amanda Orloff, and the glasses hurled into the fireplace to ensure that no lesser toast would ever be drunk from them. When the wind blew, the candles flickered and dropped molten beeswax onto the fresh white tablecloth.

Along with the cheese course they were each presented with a silver bee pin, identical to the ones the prefects wore — Quentin was at a loss to imagine any occasion on which it would be even remotely appropriate to wear it — and a heavy black two-toothed iron key that would permit them to return to Brakebills if they ever needed to. School songs were sung, and Chambers served Scotch, which Quentin had never had before. He tipped his little tumbler of it from side to side, watching the light drift through this mysterious amber fluid. It was amazing that anything in liquid form could taste that much like both smoke and fire.

He leaned over to Georgia and started to explain this fascinating conundrum to her, but as he did so Fogg stood up at the head of the table, strangely grave, dismissed Chambers, and asked the Fifth Years to follow him downstairs.

This was unexpected. Downstairs meant the cellar, where Quentin had almost never been in his whole time at Brakebills — just once or twice to sneak a particularly coveted bottle from the wine cellar, or when he and Alice had been desperate for privacy. But now Professor Fogg led them in a loose, bantering, occasionally singing flock back through the kitchen, through a small, unassuming door in the pantry, and down a flight of worn and dusty wooden stairs that changed midflight into stone. They emerged into a dark, earthy subbasement.

This wasn’t where Quentin had thought the party was going. It wasn’t a party atmosphere at all. It was cool down here and suddenly quiet. The floor was dirt, the ceilings were low, and the walls were bumpy and unfinished. They devoured sound. Voice by voice the chorus of a traditional Brakebills song — an elaborately euphemistic number entitled “The Prefect Has a Defect”—died away. There was a grave but not unpleasant smell of damp soil.

Fogg stopped at what looked like a manhole cover embedded in the dirt floor. It was brass and densely inscribed with calligraphic writing. Oddly, it looked as shiny and new as a freshly struck coin. The Dean picked up a heavy manhole tool and, with an effort, levered up the brass disk. It was two inches thick, and it took three of the Fifth Years to roll it to one side.

“After you,” the Dean said, panting a little. He gestured grandly at the inky black hole.

Quentin went first. He felt around blindly with his Scotch-benumbed feet till he found an iron rung. It was like lowering himself into warm black oil. The ladder took him and the other graduates straight down into a circular chamber large enough for all nineteen of them to stand upright in a circle, which they did. Fogg came down last; they could hear him screwing the manhole cover back into place behind them. Then he descended, too, and with a crash he sent the ladder retracting back up, like a fire escape. After that the silence was absolute.

“No point in losing our momentum,” Fogg said. He lit a candle and gamely produced two fifths of bourbon from somewhere and set them going in opposite directions around the circle. Something about this gesture unnerved Quentin. There was a certain amount of sanctioned alcohol consumption at Brakebills — a fairly large amount, really — but this was a bit much. There was something forced about it.

Well, it was graduation. They weren’t students anymore. They were grown-ups. Just peers, sharing a drink. In a secret underground dungeon, in the middle of the night. Quentin took his swig and passed it on.

Dean Fogg lit more candles in assorted brass candlesticks, making a circle within their larger circle. They couldn’t have been more than fifty yards down, but it felt like they were a solid mile beneath the earth, entombed alive, forgotten by the rest of the world.

“In case you’re wondering why we’re down here,” Fogg said, “it’s because I wanted to get us outside the Brakebills Protective Cordon. That’s a defensive magical barrier that extends out from the House in all directions. That inscribed brass hatch we opened was a gateway through it.”

The darkness swallowed his words as soon as he uttered them.

“It’s a little unsettling, yes? But it’s appropriate, because unlike me you’ll be spending the rest of your lives out here. Most years, the point of coming down here is to scare you with ghost stories about the outside world. In your case I don’t think that will be necessary. You’ve witnessed firsthand the destructive power that some magical entities possess.

“It’s unlikely you’ll ever see anything as bad as what happened on the day of the Beast. But remember that what happened that day can happen again. Those of you who were in the auditorium that day, especially, will carry the mark of it forever. You will never forget the Beast, and you can be sure it won’t forget you either.

“Forgive me if I lecture you, but it’s the last chance I’m going to get.”

Quentin was sitting opposite Fogg in the circle — they had all taken seats on the smooth stone floor — and his mild, clean-shaven face floated in the darkness like an apparition. Both bottles of whiskey reached Quentin simultaneously, and he gamely took a sip from each, one in each hand, and passed them on.

“Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic,” Fogg said expansively. “It doesn’t really make sense. It’s a little too perfect, don’t you think? If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart — reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

“Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded.

“But somewhere in the heat of magic that boundary between word and thing ruptures. It cracks, and the one flows back into the other, and the two melt together and fuse. Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.

“I sometimes feel as though we’ve stumbled on a flaw in the system, don’t you? A short circuit? A category error? A strange loop? Is it possible that magic is knowledge that would be better off forsworn? Tell me this: Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?”

He paused. No one answered. What the hell would they say? It was a little late to be scolding them now that they’d already completed their magical education.

“I have a little theory that I’d like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?” More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. “Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is it because you’re special?

“Maybe. Who knows. But I’ll tell you something: I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.

“Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.”

Quentin’s attention wandered to the tiny glimmery points of light here and there on the curved ceiling above them, pricking out the shapes of constellations he didn’t recognize, as if they were on another planet, seeing the stars from an alien angle. Someone cleared his throat.

Fogg went on.

“But just in case that’s not enough, each one of you will leave this room tonight with an insurance policy: a pentagram tattooed on your back. Five-pointed star, nicely decorative, plus it acts as a holding cell for a demon, a small but rather vicious little fellow. Cacodemon, technically.

“They’re tough little scrappers, skin like iron. In fact, I think they may be made of iron. I’ll give you each a password that sets him free. Speak the password and he’ll pop out and fight for you till he’s dead or till whoever’s giving you trouble is.”

Fogg clapped his hands on his knees and looked at them as if he’d just told them they’d all be receiving a year’s supply of attractive and useful Brakebills stationery. Georgia put up her hand tentatively.

“Is… is this optional? I mean, is anybody else besides me disturbed by the idea of having an angry demon, you know, trapped inside their skin?”

“If that bothers you, Georgia,” Fogg said curtly, “then you should have gone to beauty school. Don’t worry, he’ll be grateful as hell, so to speak, when you set him free. He’s only good for one fight though, so pick your moment.

“That’s the other reason we’re down here, by the way. Can’t conjure a cacodemon inside the Cordon.

“Why we need the bourbon, too, because this is going to hurt like a bitch. Now, who’s first? Or shall we go alphabetically?”

The next morning at ten there was a more conventional graduation ceremony in the largest and grandest of the lecture halls. It would be difficult to imagine a more miserable and visibly hungover group of graduating seniors. It was one of the rare occasions when parents were allowed on campus, so no displays of magic, or mentions of same, were allowed. Almost as bad as the hangover was the pain from the tattoo. Quentin’s back felt like it was crawling with hungry biting insects that had stumbled on something especially delicious. He was exquisitely conscious of his mother and father sitting a dozen rows behind him.

Quentin’s memories of the night before were confused. The Dean had summoned the demons himself, scribbling concentric rings of sigils on the old stone floor with thick chunks of white chalk. He worked quickly and surely, with both hands at once. For the tattooing the guys took off their shirts and jackets and lined up naked to the waist, as did the girls, with varying degrees of modesty. Some of them clutched their crumpled clothes over their chests. A few exhibitionists stripped down proudly.

In the half darkness Quentin couldn’t see what Fogg was using to draw on their skin, something slim and glinting. The designs were intricate and had strange, shifting, optical qualities. The pain was astonishing, like Fogg was flaying the skin off their backs and dressing the wounds with salt. But the pain was offset by the fear of what was coming, the moment when he implanted the demon. When they were all ready, Fogg built a low dome of loose glowing embers in the center of the sigil rings, and the room got hot and humid. Blood and smoke and sweat were in the air, and an orgiastic fever. When it was the first girl’s turn — going alphabetically that was Alsop, Gretchen — Fogg donned an iron gauntlet and rummaged around in the coals till he got a grip on something.

The red glow lit up Fogg’s face from below, and maybe it was just the distortions of memory and alcohol, but Quentin thought he saw something there that he hadn’t seen since his first day at Brakebills — something drunken and cruel and unfatherly. When he had hold of what he was looking for he heaved, and out of the embers it came: a demon, trailing sparks, heavy and dog-size and pissed off. In the same motion he crammed it wriggling into Gretchen’s slender back; he had to go back and stuff one flailing, sticking-out limb back in. She gasped, her whole body tensed, like she’d had freezing water dumped over her. And then she just looked puzzled, twisting to look over her shoulder, forgetting for a second and letting everyone see her slight, pale-nippled breasts. Because as Quentin discovered when it was his turn, there was no sensation at all.

It all felt like a dream now, though of course the first thing Quentin did that morning was check out his back in the mirror. There it was, a huge five-pointed star in thick black outline, raw and red and slightly off center to the left; he supposed it must be positioned more or less exactly with his heart at its center. Segments of the star were dense with fine squiggly black writing and smaller stars and crescent moons and other less easily identifiable icons — he looked like he hadn’t been so much tattooed as notarized, or stamped like a passport. Tired, achy, and hungover as he was, he smiled at it in the mirror. The overall effect was completely badass.

When it was all over, they shuffled out of the auditorium into the old hallway. If they’d had caps, they might have thrown them in the air, but they didn’t. There was a low hum of conversation, a couple of whoops, but that was really it; it was over, there was nothing else. If they hadn’t been graduated last night, they sure were now. They could go anywhere, do anything they wanted. This was it: the big send-off.

Alice and Quentin drifted out a side door and wandered over to a huge spreading oak, swinging their held hands between them. There was no wind. The sunlight was too bright. Quentin’s head throbbed. His parents were in the vicinity, and he’d have to go look for them in a second. Or maybe they could come looking for him for once in their lives. There would be parties tonight, he supposed, but he was already pretty much partied out. He didn’t feel like packing up his things, didn’t feel like going back to Chesterton, or Brooklyn, or anywhere else for that matter. He didn’t feel like staying, and he didn’t feel like going. He stole a glance at Alice. She looked peaked. He performed a mental search for the love he was accustomed to feel for her and found it strangely absent. If there was anything he wanted at that moment it was to be alone. But he wasn’t going to get that.

These were bad thoughts, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop the flow, stanch the cerebral hemorrhage. Here he was, a freshly licensed and bonded and accredited magician. He had learned to cast spells, seen the Beast and lived, flown to Antarctica on his own two wings, and returned naked by the sheer force of his magical will. He had an iron demon in his back. Who would ever have thought he could do and have and be all those things and still feel nothing at all? What was he missing? Or was it him? If he wasn’t happy even here, even now, did the flaw lie in him? As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know.

I got my heart’s desire, he thought, and there my troubles began.

“We have our whole lives ahead of us and all I want to do is take a nap,” Alice said.

There was a soft sound behind them. A soap bubble popping, an intake of breath, a wing beat.

Quentin turned around, and they were all there. Josh with a fringe of blond beard that made him look more than ever like a genial smiling abbot. Janet had gotten her nose pierced, and probably other parts of her. Eliot wore sunglasses, which he had never done at Brakebills, and a shirt of amazing, indescribable perfection. There was somebody else with them, too, a stranger: a serious, slightly older man, tall and darkly, bookishly handsome.

“Get your stuff together,” Josh said. He grinned even more widely and spread out his arms like a prophet. “We’re going to take you away from all this.”