The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(34)

Why would he have sealed it up? And why him in particular—everybody knew Coldwater was a wine lush. She could always ask him, he was standing about twenty yards away. Or she could get on with what she was here for. It was chilly in the passageway, much chillier than in the cozy Senior Common Room. The walls were unfinished boards over very old stone.

Dead reckoning, it was about one hundred yards from the Senior Common Room to the back of the wine closet, but she’d only gone half that distance before she came to a door, fortunately unlocked and unsealed. More passage, then another door. Like she was going through a series of airlocks. Weird. You could never tell what you were going to find in this place, even after living here for four and a half years.

The fifth door opened onto open air. That was very odd. It was a pretty little square courtyard that she’d never seen before, maybe twenty yards on a side. Mostly grass, with one tree, a pear tree, espaliered against a high stone wall. She’d always found espaliers a little creepy. It was like somebody had crucified the poor thing.

Also she was almost positive that there shouldn’t have been a moon tonight.

“Nutso,” Plum said quietly. She frowned at it. The moon looked back at her blankly, pretending not to care. She hurried across the courtyard to the next door.

It opened directly onto one of the upper floors of the library. That definitely wasn’t right; she was traversing some magically noncontiguous spaces here. The Brakebills library was arranged around the interior walls of a tower that narrowed toward the top, and this must have been one of the teensy tiny uppermost floors, which Plum had only ever glimpsed from far below, and which to be honest she’d always assumed were just there for show. She never thought there were any actual books up there.

In fact now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those tiny houses that mad kings built for their royal dwarfs. She had to navigate it on her hands and knees; she felt like Alice in Wonderland, grown too big. The books looked real enough though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters stamped on them in gold. Some interminable many-volume reference work about ghosts.

The other weird thing was that they weren’t quite inanimate: they poked themselves out at her from the shelves, butted her as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open them and read, or daring her to, or begging her. A couple of them actually jabbed her in the ribs pretty hard. They must not get a lot of visitors, she thought. Probably this is like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted.

No, thank you. If she wished to consult them she would be in touch via the usual channels. It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the far end of the balcony—it was practically a cat-door—and back into a normal corridor. This was taking longer than she thought.

But it wasn’t too late. The main course would be half over, but there was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too. She could still make it if she hurried.

This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space. In fact it was one—as near as she could tell she was inside one of the walls of Brakebills. On the other side was the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clank of heavy silverware, and she could look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in old movies about haunted houses. In fact they were just serving the main, a nice rare lamb spiked with spears of rosemary, and the sight of it made her hungry. She felt like she was a million miles away from everyone and everything she knew. She was a ghost herself, the skeleton at the feast, the world in the walls. She already felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alums, for back when she was sitting at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was.

And there was Wharton, showily pouring his mingy glasses of red, totally unrepentant. The sight emboldened her. That was why she was here. She was going to get through this. For the League.

Though God, how long was it going to take? The next door opened out onto the roof. The night air was bone cold. She hadn’t been up here since the time Professor Sunderland had turned them into geese and they’d flown down to Antarctica to study at Brakebills South. It was lonely and quiet after the dining hall—she was very high up, higher than the leafless tops of all but the tallest trees. The roof was so sharply raked she had to crawl again, and the shingles were gritty under her palms. She could see the Hudson River off in the distance, a long sinuous leaden squiggle. She shivered just looking at it.

And for the record: no moon. It was gone, back to its proper place.

Which way? She was losing the thread. After a long cold think, resulting in no definitive conclusions, Plum just jimmied the lock on the nearest dormer window and let herself in.

She was in a student’s room. Actually if she had to she’d guess it was Wharton’s room, though she’d never seen it.

“OMG,” she said out loud. “The irony.”

What were the odds? These spaces were beyond noncontiguous. Somebody at Brakebills, possibly Brakebills itself, was f*cking with her.

The room was messy as hell, which was somehow endearing, since she thought of Wharton as a control freak. And it had a nice smell. She half suspected she had stumbled into a magical duel with Wharton himself, except no way could he pull off something like this. Maybe he had help—maybe he was part of a shadowy Anti-League, committed to frustrating the goals of the League! That would actually be kind of cool.