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. Quen tin 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.