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 Quen tin’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.