The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(30)
“Oh, shit!” Chelsea said. Her hands flew to her mouth. “I hope that wasn’t, like, super expensive!”
—
Plum got up at eight the next morning, late by her standards, but instead of rejuvenating her brain the extra sleep had just made it all muzzy. It had smeared all those clear thoughts she was supposed to be having all over the inside of her skull. Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.
As a Finn who’d finished her required coursework Plum was taking all seminars that semester, and her first class was a colloquium on period magic, fifteenth-century Continental to be specific—lots of elemental stuff and weird divination techniques and Johannes Hartlieb. Holly—a fellow Leaguer, moon-faced and pretty, except for one ear which was covered in a port-wine birthmark—sat opposite her across the table, and such was Plum’s smeary state that Holly had to touch her sharp little nose meaningfully, twice, before Plum remembered that that was the signal that Stages One and Two of the plan had been completed successfully.
Stage One: “Crude but Effective.” A few hours earlier Chelsea’s boyfriend would have smuggled her into the Boys’ Tower under pretense of a predawn sex date. Nature having taken its course, Chelsea would have gone to Wharton’s door, pressed her back against it, touched her fingers to her temples in a gesture so habitual that she no longer knew she did it, rolled her eyes back into her head and entered his room in a wispy, silvery, astral state. Chelsea did it all the time—astral projection was her discipline—but it was still one of the most flat-out beautiful pieces of magic Plum had ever seen. Chelsea tossed his room for the pencil case, found it and grasped it with both of her barely substantial hands. She couldn’t get the pencil case out of the room that way, but she didn’t have to. All she had to do was lift it up to where it could be seen in the window.
Wharton himself might or might not have been watching this, depending on whether or not he was asleep, but it mattered not. Let him see.
Because once Chelsea got the case over by the window, earnest Lucy had line of sight to it from a window in an empty lecture hall in the wing opposite Wharton’s room, which meant she could teleport the pencil case in that direction, from inside Wharton’s room to midair outside it. Three feet was about as far as she could jump it, but that was plenty. Thank God for people with actual useful disciplines.
The pencil case would then fall forty feet to where Emma waited shivering in the bushes in the cold November predawn to catch it in a blanket. No magic required.
Effective? Undeniably. Needlessly complex? Perhaps. But needless complexity was the League’s signature. That was how the League rolled.
Then it was on to Stage Two: “Breakfast of Champions.” Wharton would descend late, having spent the morning frantically searching his room. Through a fog of anxiety he would barely notice that his morning oatmeal had been plunked down in front of him not by some anonymous First Year but by the purple-eared Holly in guise of same. The first mouthful would not sit right with him. He would stop and examine his morning oatmeal more closely.
It would be garnished, not with the usual generous pinches of brown sugar, but with a light dusting of aromatic, olive-green pencil shavings. Compliments of the League.
—
As the day wore on Plum got into the spirit of the prank. She’d known she would. It was mostly just her mornings that were bad. It took a lot of energy to keep being Plum. Some days she just needed a few hours to get up to speed.
Her schedule ground forward: Accelerated Advanced Kinetics; Quantum Gramarye; Joined-Hands Tandem Magicks; Manipulation of Ligneous Plants. Plum’s course-load would have been daunting for a doctoral candidate, possibly several doctoral candidates, but Plum had arrived at Brakebills with a head full of more magical theory and practice than most people left with. She wasn’t one of these standing-starters, the cold-openers, who reeled through their first year with aching hands and eyes full of stars. Plum was clever, and Plum had come to Brakebills prepared.
As the only accredited college for magic on the North American continent, Brakebills had a very large applicant pool to draw from, and it drank that pool dry. Technically nobody really applied there, Dean Fogg simply skimmed the cream of high school seniors off the top. The cream of the cream—the outliers, the extreme cases of precocious genius and obsessive motivation, the statistical freaks who had the brains and the high pain tolerance that the study of magic required. Fogg took them aside and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse; or at any rate if they could refuse it, they wouldn’t remember it.
Privately Plum thought they could put a tiny bit more emphasis in the selection process on emotional intelligence, along with the other kind. The Brakebills student body was a bit of a psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality and to actually want to work that hard you had to be at least a little bit screwed up.
Plum’s discipline was camouflage magic, the magic of concealment, and she was considered an illusionist, which she was perfectly happy about. Being an illusionist at Brakebills was, if Plum said it herself, a pretty sweet deal. You got to hang out in a tiny invisible folly castle on the edge of the forest that was quite difficult to find unless you had an illusionist-type discipline. The castle was delicate and gossamer and very Neuschwanstein, which was a nice way of saying—though Plum didn’t say it—kind of Disney. To get up in one of the towers you climbed a ladder inside it, like you were negotiating a Jefferies tube, and there was just enough room for a little chair and a desk inside the round room at the top.