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:
“Bye, baby Bunting
Daddy’s gone a-hunting
Gone to get a rabbit skin
To wrap his baby Bunting in”
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 magi cally. 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.