The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(32)

But there was more to it than that, there always had been. Underneath her mother’s scorn and indifference there was something else, and Plum wasn’t completely sure but she thought it might be fear. Fillory had made the Chatwin family famous, but most people didn’t know—or they knew but chose not to think about it—that it had ruined them too. Martin, Plum’s great-uncle, high king and hero of the Fillory books, had disappeared when he was thirteen. He was never found. Jane, the youngest, the moppet, vanished when she was the same age. The others survived, more or less, but no one came out of it unscathed. Helen changed her name and ended her life as an evangelical Christian in Texas. Fiona Chatwin got along by never once mentioning Fillory as an adult; when pressed on the subject she exhibited faint surprise and claimed she’d never heard of it.

As for Rupert, Plum’s great-grandfather, he was by all accounts a wreck of a man who spent his adult life in neurotic seclusion until Field Marshal Erwin Rommel came along to put him out of his misery.

Something had happened to that family. There was a curse on them, and its name was Fillory—Plum’s mom talked about Fillory like it was almost real. Maybe it was the books, maybe it was Plover, maybe it was the parents, or the war, or fate, but when Fillory and Earth touched the collision was pure damage, and the Chatwins were the point of contact. They were right there at ground zero and they were blown to vapor, like the human shadows at Hiroshima. Plum was pretty sure that none of them had attained total or even partial self-actualization.

Plum’s mother wanted no part of that. And a good thing too, as far as Plum was concerned, because deep down she felt the fear too. When Plum discovered magic it was the most magnificent kind of surprise, the kind that never got less surprising. The world was even more interesting than she thought it was! But it also made her uneasy. Because just speaking logically here, if magic was real then could you still be absolutely one-hundred-percent positive that Fillory wasn’t? And if Fillory was real—which it almost certainly wasn’t—then whatever it was that had torn through an entire generation of her family like a lion through a flock of loitering gazelle was real too, and it might still be out there. Plum dug into magic with both hands, but always at the back of her mind was the thought that she might go too far, dig too deep, and dig up something that she would wish had stayed buried.

She especially thought about that when those depressive, anhedonic chemicals were singing in her bloodstream, because then she kind of wanted to dig it up. She wanted to look it in the face. She could hear Fillory calling to her, or if not Fillory then something—somewhere beautiful and distant and sirenlike where she had never been but that was also somehow home. And she knew what side of the family her depressive streak came from. That was her Chatwin inheritance, right there.

So she kept her Chatwinity to herself. She didn’t want people pushing at it, picking at it, lest its ragged, unstable edges start to unravel. Sometimes Plum wondered if there was a way to use her Discipline to hide not just things but words, facts, names, feelings, hide them so well that even she couldn’t find them. What she wanted was to hide herself from herself.

But she couldn’t. That was stupid. You were who you were. You lived your life. You didn’t brood—ruminative thinking, that’s what her shrink had called it. You got on with things. You founded the League. You pranked the hell out of Wharton.

Plum wound up having a pretty good day; at any rate it was a lot better than Wharton’s. In first period he found more pencil shavings on the seat of his chair. Walking to lunch he found his pockets stuffed full of jet-black pencil eraser rubbings. It was like a horror movie—his precious pencils were being tortured to death, minute by minute, in an undisclosed location, and he was powerless to save them! He would rue his short-pouring ways, so he would.

Passing Wharton by chance in a courtyard, Plum let her eyes slide past his with a slow smile she felt only a little bit bad about. Was it her imagination, or did he look just the slightest bit haunted? Maybe Brakebills did have a ghost after all. Maybe it was Plum.

Finally—and this was Plum’s touch, and she privately thought it was the deftest one—in his fourth-period class, a practicum on diagramming magical energies, Wharton found that the Brakebills pencil he was using, on top of its bad hand-feel and whatever else, wouldn’t draw what he wanted it to. Whatever spell he tried to diagram, whatever points and rays and vectors he tried to sketch, they inevitably formed a series of letters.

The letters spelled out: COMPLIMENTS OF THE LEAGUE.





CHAPTER 8


Dinners at Brakebills had a nice formal pomp about them. When one was cornered by sad, nostalgic Brakebills graduates who had peaked in college and were back reliving their glory days, sooner or later they always got around to reminiscing about evenings in the ol’ dining hall. It was long and narrow and shadowy and paneled in dark wood and lined with murky oil paintings of past deans in various states of period dress. Light came from hideous, lopsided silver candelabras placed along the table every ten feet, and the candle flames were always flaring up or snuffing out or changing color under the influence of some stray spell or other. Everybody wore identical Brakebills uniforms. Students’ names were inscribed on the table at their assigned places, which changed nightly according to, apparently, the whims of the table.

That night Plum ate her first course as usual, two rather uninspired crab cakes, skipping the wine, as she usually did, then excused herself to go to the ladies’. As Plum passed behind her Darcy discreetly held out the silver pencil case behind her back, and Plum pocketed it. She wasn’t going to the ladies’, of course. Well, she was, but only because she had to. She wouldn’t be going back after.