The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(38)

And now she did sob: once, twice, three times. They were going to turn her out into the cold, scary world. She wasn’t ready. It wasn’t safe. What was she going to do? How was she going to live now?

“I know. Please don’t worry about it.” He said it quietly. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this. And you might as well call me Quentin.”

“But what are you going to do? What am I going to do?”

“You’ll find something. It’s a big world. Probably bigger than you realize.”

“But I’m a failure! I’m a freak! I got kicked out of Brakebills, for God’s sake!”

The words barely had any meaning. They would soon, she knew, but right now it made her lips feel numb just to say them, as if the words were envenomed. She was expelled. She thought of having to say them to her parents and the gray came back.

“Something will come up, I promise you. Plenty of people have Brakebills degrees, but how many people can say they got kicked out? It’s a pretty exclusive club.”

She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t snort at that.

“But if you don’t mind my asking,” he went on, “what exactly were you doing back there? I sealed that corridor off for a reason. Even I couldn’t figure out where it went.”

“Oh, I told Fogg the truth. I really was pranking Wharton.”

“But why?”

“Well, he’s been kind of stingy with the wine lately. Plus it just seemed to me like there should be more, I don’t know, chicanery afoot around here. Generally. High jinks. It sounds silly now, but you know what I mean? To lighten the tone. Because basically who knows, we could all drop dead at any moment.”

“That is true.”

“Or get expelled.”

Quentin appeared to accept her reasoning at face value. Old people: you never knew what you were going to get.

“Do you still want to know where the secret passage is? To the wine closet?”

“Sure,” Plum said, though not unshakily. She managed a bitter little laugh. “Why the hell not?”

But she meant it. Fuck it. They could take Brakebills away from her—apparently—but at least the honor of the League would live on eternally. She would always have that.

“You want the next panel over,” Quentin said. “You don’t count the half-panel.”

Aha. She drew the same rune-word she had before, and the door opened, and she peered inside. It was just what she thought: a cakewalk. Not even one hundred yards, more like seventy-five.

After all that the timing was pretty close to perfect. Plum had just closed the secret door to the wine closet behind her—it was concealed behind a trick wine rack—when Wharton came bustling in through the front door with the rumble and glow of the cheese course subsiding behind him. Her hair was a mess, but that was just part of the effect. It was all extremely “League.”

Wharton froze, with a freshly recorked bottle in one hand and two inverted wineglasses dangling from the fingers of the other. Plum regarded him calmly. Some of the charm of Wharton’s face came from its asymmetry: he’d had a harelip corrected at some point, and the surgery had gone well, so that all that was left was a tiny tough-guy scar, as if he’d taken one straight in the face at some point but kept on trucking.

Also he had an incredibly precious widow’s peak. Some guys had all the luck.

“You’ve been short-pouring the Finns,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “You have my pencils.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not the pencils I mind,” Wharton said, “so much as the case. And the knife. They’re antique silver, Smith and Sharp. You can’t find those anywhere anymore.”

She took the case out of her pocket. She wasn’t going to give an inch, not even after everything else. Especially not. To hell with the ghost, and to hell with Brakebills, and to deepest darkest hell with the Chatwins. The world had split open under her feet, and nothing would ever be the same, but she would still play her part to the hilt. To the end. They couldn’t take that away.

“Why have you been short-pouring the Finns?”

“Because I need the extra wine.”

God, was he really an alcoholic? Nothing should surprise her at this point, but still. He didn’t seem like the type. Epifanio, maybe, but not Wharton. And Wharton wouldn’t be an enabler like that.

“But what do you need it for?” Plum held the case just out of reach. “I’ll give you back the pencils and all that. I just want to know.”

“What do you think?” Wharton said. “I leave it out for the damn ghost. I thought the wine might keep it happy. That thing scares the shit out of me.”

Wharton had a lot to learn about ghosts. She sighed and sat down on a crate. All her strength was gone.

“Me too.” She handed him the case.

Wharton sat down next to her and pulled over a little table. He placed the two glasses on it.

“Wine?”

“Thanks,” Plum said. “I’d love some.”

If not now, when? He poured, properly this time, even a little heavy. The dark liquid looked black in the glass, and she had to restrain herself from gulping it.

Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew.