The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(43)

Quentin did the one thing he knew would feel good: he shut his eyes for the first time in three days and kept them shut for a good minute. He’d missed his eyelids.

Plum was lying next to him. A minute ago he wouldn’t have had to turn his head to look at her, but now he swiveled his small, pale nub of a human head in her direction. She looked back at him, pale and shivering.

“Final leg,” he said thickly.

Huh: lips and teeth. What a concept. He pushed at them clumsily with his tongue.

“Final leg,” she said.

Quentin levered himself up off the shale and immediately fell over. Gravity, my old enemy. What a stupid way to locomote. Standing up felt like trying to balance a telephone pole on one end.

They were on a narrow curving beach, black pebbles and gray sand; it was just about the least tropical beach in the world. They were both naked, and there might have been a time when, as a human male, he was at least notionally interested in the sight of Plum without her clothes on, but he was still mentally more than half cetacean, and the relative nakedness or clothed-ness of a human of either sex really could not have been more beside the point to him. He could barely remember what they were doing here.

Fortunately they’d talked through what would happen next, drilled it into their brains, which they knew would not be functioning at full capacity. They both began searching through the rocks and tide marks, heads down. This had to be done quickly, before hypothermia set in. Quentin reeled like a drunk, cutting his strange, unbearably soft yellow-pink feet on the unsympathetic rocks, until—there. A feather. White flecked with gray. He plucked it out of a mass of sticky, smelly sea-trash. No time to be picky. Basically anything but a penguin would do.

It was coming back to him, the purpose of all this. He waited, bouncing on his toes, hands clumped under his armpits to keep his fingers warm, getting increasingly self-conscious about being naked, until Plum found hers. Then he clamped the feather between his chattering teeth, and they did the spells at the same time.

This time the change was bad, and he threw up when it was done, though granted throwing up isn’t as big a deal to a bird as it is to a human. He made a neat, hygienic job of it—business as usual. After its brief reunion with humanity his brain went animal again, this time having to endure the insult of being squeezed into the tablespoon volume of a seabird’s skull. He got oriented in time to watch Plum dwindle into the shape of a seabird twenty yards away, her pale body feathering over and collapsing in on itself into—he didn’t even know what kind of bird she was. Or for that matter what he was.

He was whatever kind of bird that feather had belonged to. A moment of contact with Plum’s turmeric-yellow, perfectly circular eye, then they both took flight.

Onward and upward.





CHAPTER 10


Quentin had never heard of anybody going to Brakebills South in the gap between fall and spring semesters, which this was, and he wasn’t even a hundred percent positive they could get in. They might find the building shut down, Mayakovsky gone or in hiding, the whole place sealed off. If that happened they’d have to reassess pretty fast and make a break for one of the non-magical research stations on the coast, where their arrival would be hard to explain at best.

They spiraled in from above, balancing on their aching wings, steeling themselves for the moment when their webbed seabird feet would skip off the surface of some hard invisible dome—but the moment never came. Apparently Mayakovsky considered five hundred miles of Antarctic no-man’s-land enough of a defense against home invasion. They alighted on the flat roof of one of the towers and became human again.

Quentin figured it was better to let Mayakovsky find them rather than the other way around—he didn’t want to startle the old magician into some lethal display of defensive magic—so they made as much noise as possible coming down the stairs. First stop was the laundry, where they secured some Brakebills South robes: the nakedness issue was starting to feel urgent again.

The place felt off-limits, out of bounds. It was like they were hunting a minotaur in its maze. Quentin trailed one hand idly along a wall, and the smooth stone was cool and sticky with condensed moisture, something about the heating spells—it gave off a damp basement smell that brought back memories of the last time he’d been here, when they were all studying eighteen hours a day under Mayakovsky’s rule of silence. There was something he didn’t have to worry about at Brakebills South: nostalgia.

He was too hungry to feel anything anyway. They wound up in the kitchen, where they stuffed themselves on anything they could find that might possibly get the taste of bird beak out of their mouths. Quentin was keenly aware that Mayakovsky had no real reason to help them, even assuming he could. He’d always known he wouldn’t have much to offer by way of compensation, aside from an intellectually interesting problem and some shameless flattery and, he supposed, the strictly—strictly—platonic presence of a smart and pretty young woman. But somehow it had all been more convincing when they were first setting out.

They never heard Mayakovsky coming, he just appeared in the doorway, silent as a ghost, looking grim and hungover and unbathed. His stubble was slightly frostier, his gut more prominent, his nails yellower, but otherwise he was perfectly preserved. It was like Antarctica had freeze-dried him.

He didn’t kill them.

“Saw you coming,” he growled. “Miles away.”