Now that his friends had come back from vacation Eliot sat with them at meals instead. They were a highly visible clique, always earnestly conferring with each other and having fits of obstreperous public laughter, conspicuously fond of themselves and uninterested in the greater Brakebills populace. There was something different about them, though it was hard to say what. They weren’t better-looking or smarter than anybody else. They just seemed to know who they were, and they weren’t constantly looking around at everybody else as if they could tell them.
It rankled the way Eliot had dropped Quentin the minute he ceased to be convenient, but then there were the nineteen other First Years to think of. Though they weren’t a wildly social bunch. They were quiet and intense, always eyeing each other assessingly, as if they were trying to figure out who—if it came right down to it—would take out who in an intellectual death match. They didn’t congregate overmuch—they were always civil but rarely warm. They were used to competing and used to winning. In other words, they were like Quentin, and Quentin wasn’t used to being around people like himself.
The one student he and every other First Year at Brakebills was immediately obsessed with was little Alice, of the tiny glass creature, but it quickly became apparent that in spite of being way ahead of the rest of her year academically she was cripplingly shy, to the point where there wasn’t much point in trying to talk to her. When approached at meals she answered questions in whispered monosyllables, her gaze dropping to the tablecloth in front of her as if weighed down by some infinite inner shame. She was almost pathologically unable to make eye contact, and she had a way of hiding her face behind her hair that made it clear how agonizing it was for her to be the object of human attention.
Quentin wondered who or what could possibly have convinced somebody with such obvious gifts that she should be frightened of other people. He wanted to keep up a proper head of competitive steam, but instead he felt almost protective of her. The one and only time he saw Alice look genuinely happy was when he watched her, alone and momentarily unself-conscious, successfully skip a pebble across the pool in a fountain and between the legs of a stone nymph.
Life at Brakebills had a hushed, formal, almost theatrical tone to it, and at mealtimes formality was elevated to the level of a fetish. Dinners were served promptly at six thirty; latecomers were denied the privilege of a chair and ate standing. Faculty and students sat together at one interminable table that was swathed in a tablecloth of mystical whiteness and laid with heavy-handled silverware that didn’t match. Illumination was provided by battalions of hideous candelabras. The food, contrary to private school tradition, was excellent in an old-fashioned, Frenchified way. Menus tended toward mid-century warhorses like boeuf en daube and lobster thermidor. First Years had the privilege of serving all the other students as waiters, under the stern direction of Chambers, and then eating by themselves when everybody else was done. Third and Fourth Years were allowed one glass of wine with dinner; Fifth Years (or “Finns,” as they were called, for no obvious reason) got two. Oddly enough there were only ten Fourth Years, half the usual number, and nobody would explain why. Asking about it just ended the conversation.
All this Quentin picked up with the speed of a sailor cast away on a savage foreign continent, who has no choice but to learn the local language as rapidly as possible or be devoured by those who speak it. His first two months at Brakebills spun by, and soon red and gold leaves were scattering across the Sea, as if they were being pushed by invisible brooms—which possibly they were?—and the flanks of the slow-moving topiary beasts in the Maze showed streaks of color.
Quentin devoted a half hour every day after class to exploring the campus on foot. One blustery afternoon he stumbled onto a pocket vineyard, a postage stamp of earth ruled into straight lines and planted with rows of grapevines strung up on rusty wires and trained into weird vinicultural candelabra shapes. By now the grapes had already been harvested, and those that hadn’t had shriveled on the vine into tiny fragrant raisins.
Beyond it, a quarter mile off into the woods, at the end of a narrow path, Quentin discovered a small field neatly divided into a patchwork of squares. Some of the squares were grass, some were stone, some were sand, some were water, and two were made of blackened, silvery metal, elaborately inscribed.
There was no fence or wall to mark the edge of the grounds, or if there was he never found it. There was just the river along one side and woods all around the rest. Even so the faculty seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time maintaining the spells that kept the school invisible and impregnable to outsiders. They were constantly strolling the perimeter, studying things Quentin couldn’t see, and pulling one another out of classes to consult about it.
SNOW
One afternoon in late October Professor March asked Quentin to stay behind after Practical Applications. P.A.—as everybody called it—was the part of the day when the students worked on actual spellcasting. was the part of the day when the students worked on actual spellcasting. They were allowed to attempt only the most basic magic at this stage, under smotheringly close supervision, but still. It was a small practical reward for all those oceans of theory they were navigating.
That particular class had not been a successful one for Quentin. P.A. was held in a room that resembled a college chemistry lab: indestructible gray stone tables; counters mottled with ancient unspeakable stains; deep, capacious sinks. The air was thickly charged with permanent charms and wards installed by generations of Brakebills professors to prevent students from injuring themselves or each other. It carried a whiff of ozone.
Quentin watched his lab partner Surendra dust his hands with a white powder (equal parts flour and beech-wood ash), draw certain invisible sigils in the air with a freshly trimmed willow wand, and then bring the wand softly down on his marble (nickname: Rakshasa!), slicing it neatly in half with one stroke, first try. But when Quentin brought the willow wand down on his marble (nickname: Martin) it burst with a quiet pop, like a dying lightbulb, throwing off a spray of glass chunks and powder. Quentin dropped the wand and spun away to shield his eyes; everybody else in the room craned their heads to look. The atmosphere in the P.A. room wasn’t particularly collegial.
So Quentin was already in a foul mood when Professor March asked him to stay behind after class. March chatted with stragglers in the hall while Quentin sat on one of the indestructible tables, swinging his legs and thinking black thoughts. He was somewhat reassured that Alice had been asked to stay behind, too. She sat by the window staring dreamily out at the sluggish Hudson. Her marble floated in slow circles around her head, a lazy miniature satellite, sometimes clicking against the glass when she leaned too close. Why did magic come to her so effortlessly? he wondered. Or was it as effortless as it looked? He couldn’t believe it was as hard for her as it was for him. Penny was there, too, looking pale and intense and moon-faced as always. He wore the Brakebills uniform, but they’d let him keep his mohawk.
Professor March came back in, followed by Professor Van der Weghe. She didn’t mince words.
“We asked you three to stay behind because we are considering advancing you to Second Year for the spring term,” she said. “You would have to do some extra work on your own in order to pass your First Year exams in December and then catch up to the Second Years, but I think you’re up to it. Am I right?”
She looked around encouragingly. She wasn’t really asking them so much as telling them. Quentin and Penny and Alice glanced at one another uneasily and looked away again. From long experience Quentin had learned not to be surprised when his intellectual abilities were rated over other people’s, and this mark of favor certainly wiped out the nightmare of his pulverized marble, with interest. But everybody was acting very solemn and serious about it. It sounded like a lot of work for the privilege of skipping a year at Brakebills, which he wasn’t even sure he wanted to do anyway.
“Why?” Penny spoke up. “Why move us up? Are you going to move other students down to make room for us?”
He had a point. It was an immutable fact of life at Brakebills that there were always twenty students per class, no more and no fewer.
“Different students learn at different speeds, Penny,” was all she said. “We want to keep everybody where they’re most comfortable.”
There were no further questions. After a suitable interval Professor Van der Weghe accepted their silence as consent.
“All right then,” she said. “Good luck to all of you.”
Those words plunged Quentin into a new and darker phase of his life at Brakebills, just when he’d gotten comfortable with the old one. Until then he’d worked hard, but he got in his share of malingering like everybody else. He wandered around campus and killed time with the other First Years in the First Years’ lounge, which was a shabby but cozy room with a fireplace and an assortment of critically injured couches and armchairs and embarrassingly lame “educational” board games, basically magical versions of Trivial Pursuit, all warped and stained and missing crucial pieces and cards and spinners. They even had a contraband video-game console set up in a closet, a three-year-old box hooked up to an even older TV. It fuzzed out and rebooted whenever anybody fired up a spell within two hundred yards of it, which was pretty much constantly.
That was before. Now there was no time when Quentin wasn’t studying. As often as Eliot had warned him about what he was in for, and as hard as he’d worked up till now, he still somehow imagined that learning magic would turn out to be a delightful journey through a secret garden where he would gaily pluck the heavy fruit of knowledge from conveniently low-hanging branches. Instead every afternoon after P.A. Quentin went straight to the library to rush through his regular homework so he could betake himself after dinner to the library, where his appointed tutor waited for him.
His tutor was Professor Sunderland, the pretty young woman who had asked him to draw maps during his Examination. She looked nothing like a magician was supposed to: she was blond and dimply and distractingly curvy. Professor Sunderland taught mostly upper-level courses, Fourth and Fifth Years, and didn’t have much patience for amateurs. She drilled him relentlessly on gestures and incantations and charts and tables, and when he was perfect, that was a start, but she’d like to see Popper etudes No. 7 and No. 13 again, please, slowly, forward and then backward, just to make sure. Her hands did things Quentin couldn’t imagine his hands ever doing. It would have been intolerable if Quentin didn’t have a ferocious crush on Professor Sunderland.
He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It’s not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.
Quentin spent a lot more of his time with Alice and Penny now. Brakebills had an eleven-o’clock lights-out policy for First Years, but with their extra workload the three of them had to find a way around it. Fortunately there was a small study off one of the student wings that, according to Brakebills lore, was exempt from whatever monitoring spells the faculty used to enforce curfew. Probably they left it like that deliberately as a loophole for situations like this. It was a leftover space—musty, windowless, and trapezoidal—but it had a couch and a table and chairs, and the faculty never checked it after hours, so that was where Quentin, Alice, and Penny went when the rest of the First Years went to bed.
They made an odd little tribe: Alice sitting hunched over the table; Quen tin sprawled on the couch; Penny pacing in circles, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. The odious Popper books were hexed in such a way that you could practice in front of them and they would tell you if you’d screwed up or not by turning green (good) or red (bad), although annoyingly they wouldn’t tell you how you’d screwed up.
But Alice always knew how you screwed up. Of the three of them she was the prodigy, with preternaturally flexible hands and wrists and a freakish memory. When it came to languages she was omnivorous and insatiable. While her classmates were still wallowing in the shallows of Middle English, she was already plunging into Arabic and Aramaic and Old High Dutch and Old Church Slavonic. She was still painfully shy, but the late nights she spent with Quentin and Penny in the after-hours room wore away some of her reserve, to the point where she would sometimes exchange notes and pointers with the other two. Once in a while she even revealed a sense of humor, though more often than not she made her jokes in Old Church Slavonic.
They probably would have been lost on Penny anyway. He had no sense of humor at all. He practiced by himself, murmuring and watching his pale hands sign and flutter in a massive baroque gilt-framed mirror leaned up against the wall. The mirror had an old, fading, forgotten enchantment on it, so Penny’s reflection was sometimes replaced with an image of a treeless green hillside, a smooth grassy curve under an overcast sky. It was like a TV with a poorly installed cable box, picking up a stray image from far away, some other world.
Rather than take a break, Penny would just wait silently and impassively for the image to change back. Secretly the mirror made Quentin nervous, as if something horrible were about to come strolling over the top of that hill, or was buried restlessly underneath it.
“I wonder where it is,” Alice said. “In real life.”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “Maybe it’s in Fillory.”
“You could climb through. That’s always how it works in the books.”
“How great would that be? Think about it: we could go through and study for a month and come back and ace this thing.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to go to Fillory so you can get more homework done,” Alice said. “Because that would be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”