“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 Quentin heard—did he imagine it?—the pop of a cork being withdrawn from a bottle.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.”