They gave him a teaching schedule. They gave him a seat in the dining room, and the authority to discipline students. They also gave him something he should have gotten long ago, something he’d almost forgotten he didn’t have: a discipline.
Every magician had a natural predisposition to a certain specific kind of magic. Sometimes it was something trivial, sometimes it was genuinely useful, but everyone had one: it was a kind of sorcerous fingerprint. But they’d never been able to find Quentin’s. As part of his induction into the Brakebills faculty Quentin was required to state his discipline, at which point it occurred to him that he still didn’t know what it was.
Just as they had a dozen years ago they sent him to Professor Sunderland, a woman with whom he’d been seethingly, volcanically infatuated when he was an undergraduate. She met him in the same long sunlit lab she’d worked in back then; it was weird to think that she’d been here this whole time while he’d been off careening disastrously around the multiverse, and that they were now, for most practical purposes, peers.
If anything she was even more beautiful than she had been at twenty-five. Her face had ripened and softened. She looked more like herself, though what he’d thought of at the time as her serene, otherworldly quality now felt a bit more like a slight lack of affect—he hadn’t noticed how withdrawn and shut-down she was.
He’d felt so far below her then, he wasn’t sure she’d even remember him. But she did.
“Of course I do. You weren’t quite as invisible as you thought you were.”
Had he thought that? Probably he had.
“Does that mean my secret crush on you wasn’t as secret as I thought it was?”
She smiled, but not unkindly.
“The concealment of crushes probably isn’t your discipline,” she said. “Roll up your sleeves, above your elbows. Let me see the backs of your hands.”
He showed her. She gave them a brisk rub with fine powder and an irregular pattern of tiny cold sparks appeared on his skin, like a sparsely populated countryside seen from above by night. He thought he felt a web of icy prickles too, though that could have been his imagination.
“Mmmmm.”
She chewed her lip, studying him, then she tapped his hands, one, two, like a child playing a game, and the sparks went out. There was nothing there that interested Professor Sunderland. Or Pearl—now that they were colleagues he should get in the habit of calling her by her first name.
She snipped a lock of his hair and burned it in a brazier. It smelled like burning hair. She scrutinized the smoke.
“Nope.”
Now that the pleasantries were out of the way she was all business. He could have been a tricky flower arrangement that she couldn’t get quite right. She studied him through a graduated series of smoked lenses while he walked backward around the room.
“Why do you think this is so difficult?” Quentin asked, trying not to run into anything.
“Mm? Don’t look over your shoulder.”
“My discipline? Why do you think it’s so hard to figure out?”
“Could be a few things.” She smoothed her straight blond hair back behind her ears and switched lenses. “It could be occluded. Some disciplines just by their natures don’t want to be found. Some are just really minor, pointless really, and it’s hard to pick them out of the background noise.”
“Right. Though could it also be”—he stumbled over a stool—“because it’s something interesting? That no one’s ever seen before?”
“Sure. Why not.”
He’d always envied Penny his fancy and apparently unique discipline, which was interdimensional travel. But from her tone he suspected she could have listed a few reasons why not.
“Remember when I made those sparks, that one time?”
“I remember. Aha. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Stand still.”
He stopped, and Pearl rummaged in a drawer and took out a heavy, brass-edged ruler marked in irregular units that Quentin didn’t recognize.
“Close your eyes.”
He did, and immediately an electric bar of pain flashed across the back of his right hand. He clamped it between his knees; it was ten seconds before he even recovered enough to say ow. When he opened his eyes he half expected to see his fingers sheared right off at the second knuckle.
They were still there, though they were turning red. She’d whacked them with the sharp edge of the ruler.
“Sorry,” she said. “The pain response is often very revealing.”
“Listen, if that doesn’t do it I think I’m all right with not knowing.”
“No, that did it. You’re very sensitive, I must say.”
Quentin didn’t think that not wanting to get smacked across the knuckles with a ruler made him unusually sensitive, but he didn’t say anything, and Pearl was already paging through a huge old reference book printed all in jewel type. Quentin had a sudden crazy urge to stop her. He’d been living with this for so long, it was part of who he was—he was the Man Without a Discipline. Was he ready to give that up? If she told him he’d be like everybody else . . .
But he didn’t stop her.
“I had a pet theory about you.” Pearl ran her finger down a column. “Which was that I couldn’t find your discipline last time because you didn’t have one yet. I always thought you were a bit young for your age. Personality is a factor—maturity. You were old enough to have a discipline, but emotionally you weren’t there yet. You hadn’t come into focus.”
That was kind of embarrassing. And like his crush, it had probably been obvious to more people than he realized.
“I guess I’m a late bloomer,” Quentin said.
“There you are.” She tapped the page. “Repair of small objects, that’s you.”
“Repair of small objects.”
“Uh-huh!”
He couldn’t honestly say that it was everything he’d hoped for.
“Small like a chair?”
“Think smaller,” she said. “Like, I don’t know, a coffee cup.” She shaped her hands around an invisible mug. “Have you had any special luck with that? Lesser bindings, reconstitutions, that kind of thing?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He couldn’t actually say that he’d ever noticed. Maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention.
It was a bit of an anticlimax. You couldn’t call it sexy, exactly. Not breaking new ground, so much. He wouldn’t be striding between dimensions, or calling down thunderbolts, or manifesting patroni, not on the strength of repair of small objects. Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.
But it wasn’t going to kill him. It wasn’t sexy, but it was real, and that was what mattered now. No more fantasies—that was life after Fillory. Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity. He’d been learning a lot about himself lately, and he’d thought it would be painful, and it was, but it was a relief too. These were things he’d been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren’t quite as scary as he thought.
Or maybe he was tougher than he thought. At any rate he wouldn’t have to be retroactively expelled from the Physical Kids. Repair of small objects would have made the cut.
“Off you go,” Pearl said. “Fogg will probably have you take over the First Year class on Minor Mendings.”
“I expect he will,” Quentin said.
And he did.
CHAPTER 3
Quentin thought he’d find teaching satisfying, but he didn’t actually expect to enjoy it. That seemed like too much to hope for. But as it turned out he did enjoy it.
Five mornings a week at nine A.M. he stood up in front of Minor Mendings, chalk in hand, scribbled lecture notes in front of him, and looked out at the students—his students now—and they looked back at him. Mostly their faces were blank—blank with terror, blank with total confusion, blank with boredom, but blank. Quentin realized now that that must be how he used to look. When you were just one of the class you tended to forget the professor could see you.
His first lecture was not a success. He stuttered; he repeated himself; he lost his train of thought and stopped cold, dead air, while he tried to figure out where he’d been going with this a second ago. He’d prepared ten points he wanted to cover, but he was so afraid that he’d run out of material that he dragged out the first point for half an hour and then had to rush through the other nine at top speed to fit them all in. It turned out that teaching was a skill you had to learn, like everything else.
But gradually it dawned on him that he at least knew what he was talking about. His track record in life and love wasn’t exactly flawless, but he did possess a large amount of practical information about the care and feeding of supernatural forces, and teaching was just a matter of getting that information out of his head and into the clever, receptive heads of his students in orderly installments. It was a long way from running a secret magical kingdom, but then again Fillory had never really needed him that badly, had it. Fillory pretty much ran itself. Whereas these kids, floundering as they were in the choppy, frigid waters of introductory gramarye, would have been lost without him. They needed him, and it felt good to be needed.
Knowing his discipline helped too. He’d always considered himself decent at magic, but he’d never had a strong sense of exactly who he was as a magician. Now he did: he was someone who fixed things. He saw that now. Give Quentin a broken object and in his hands it woke up, as if from an unhappy dream, and remembered that it had once been whole. A smashed coffee cup, so utterly hopeless and without power, bestirred itself and regained some of its old gumption. It hadn’t always been this way. No—it had once had a convenient handle. It had once had the power to hang on to a liquid instead of letting it gush through its shattered innards onto the floor.
And with a little encouragement from Quentin, it would again. God, but he loved doing magic. He’d almost forgotten how satisfying it was, even the little things. Doing magic was like finally finding the words you’d been groping for your whole life. You’d always known what you wanted to say, it was on the tip of your tongue, you almost had it, you knew it a moment ago but somehow forgot it—and then there it was. Casting the spell was like finally finding the words: there, that’s what I meant, that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.
All he had to do was explain this to his students. As a faculty member he was also expected to conduct independent research, but until he could come up with a problem that was worth researching, teaching was what he did. He did it five days a week, a lecture at nine and then Practical Applications at two.
At the same time he settled back into the rhythm of life at Brakebills, which wasn’t so different as a professor than it had been as a student. He didn’t have homework anymore, but he had to spend his nights preparing lectures, which was fine because he didn’t have much else to do anyway. He held himself appropriately aloof from his students, and so far the other faculty, appropriately or not, left the new fish to his own devices.
Little things had changed. Rumor had it that Brakebills had acquired a ghost, and though Fogg hadn’t seen it himself—it wasn’t clear who had—he was bursting with pride about it. Apparently all the old European institutions had them, and in those circles a magic school hadn’t really arrived till it was haunted. The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they’d begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.
Which sounded interesting, but so far the resulting offspring had been either predictably derivative (in fiction) or stunningly boring (nonfiction); hybrid pairings between fiction and nonfiction were the most vital. The librarian thought the problem was just that the right books weren’t breeding with each other and proposed a forced mating program. The library committee had an epic secret meeting about the ethics of literary eugenics which ended in a furious deadlock.
Quentin could feel himself slipping back into the thick, rich, comforting atmosphere of Brakebills, like a bee drowning in honey. Sometimes he caught himself thinking about what it would be like to stay there forever. And he might have done that if something hadn’t interrupted him: his father died.
It caught Quentin off guard. It had been a long time since he’d felt close to his father. He didn’t think about him much, or his mother. It had never even occurred to him that his father could die.
Quentin’s dad had lived an unspectacular life, and he slipped out of the world at sixty-seven with the unshowiness that was his trademark: he died in his sleep of a stroke. He even managed to spare Quentin’s mom the shock of waking up next to a slowly cooling corpse: she was doing an artist’s residency in Provincetown, and his body was discovered by the woman who did the cleaning instead, a stolid, rigorously Catholic Ukrainian who was in every way more spiritually prepared for the experience than Quentin’s mom would have been.
It happened in mid-October, about six weeks after Quentin came back to Brakebills. Dean Fogg brought him the news, which had been transmitted to him via the school’s one ancient rotary telephone. When Quentin understood what Fogg was telling him he went very cold and very still. It was impossible. It made no sense. It was as if his father had announced that he was going to take up mariachi drumming and march in the Cinco de Mayo parade. His father couldn’t be dead—he wouldn’t be. It just wasn’t like him.