“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 pl
ans 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 downstai
rs. 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.