The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(92)
“So—what? So you figured it out, and magic is for making lands?”
“No.” Quentin closed his eyes. “I still have no idea what magic is for. Maybe you just have to decide for yourself. But you definitely have to decide. It’s not for sitting on my ass, which I know because I’ve tried that. Am I making any sense?”
“You have not been making sense for some time.”
“I was afraid of that. Well, it’ll mean something when you’re my age. You’re what, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-one.”
“OK, well, I’m thirty.”
“That’s not that old,” Plum said.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Fair enough. So what do you think the land is going to look like?”
“I don’t know that either,” Quentin said. “I try to picture it sometimes, but it’s always different. Sometimes it’s meadows. Sometimes it’s an orchard, just rows and rows of apple trees. Maybe it looks like whatever you want it to.”
“I hope it looks like the Hundred Acre Wood,” Plum said. “I think you should concentrate on that.”
CHAPTER 20
Plum needed a night off. It was early April in Manhattan, and winter break was almost over at Brakebills, but some of her former classmates were still in the city. Knowing they were so close she was overcome by a fit of longing for her old life. She decided to indulge it.
She wasn’t even completely sure if she was still received in polite company, after her dramatic departure from Brakebills, so Plum was relieved when they turned up. The venue was a basement bar on Houston Street with a low ceiling and a lot of busted couches and a decent jukebox; it had survived untouched by the rage for elaborately perfect artisanal cocktails. Most of the old League was there, plus a few extras, including Wharton—their impending entry into the wider world seemed to have brought him and the Leaguers together, to the point where they were all more or less on the same side. Plum got the impression that the League had pretty much gone dormant in her absence anyway.
Well, time to put aside childish things, as the verse sayeth. At least they’d gone out on top.
They drank pints of IPA and attempted observational humor about the civilians or muggles or mundanes or whatever you wanted to call them all around them. They made bets about what people were feeling, and then Holly, who had a knack for it, did a mind-reading to see who was right. She couldn’t get anything too specific, not words, or images, just the emotional tone, but that was usually enough. Bars were a good place for it. Alcohol had a way of making people’s minds more transparent, like oil on paper.
Plum knew they were going to talk about Brakebills, and she knew that it was going to hurt. It was partly what she came for, the pain. She was going to test her new sense of herself as someone who was past all that now, who’d had a taste of life in the real world, even though it was turning out to be something of an acquired taste.
Fortunately the pain, when it came, came in bearable quantities of ache. Hearing news from the candlelit bubble-world of Brakebills helped her mourn for the comparatively simple, hopeful Plum who used to inhabit that world. Tonight would be a wake for that other Plum, the Plum who’d never tried that stupid prank. Rest in peace.
She interrogated them methodically for gossip. They were absolutely teeming with it: with graduation coming the Fifth Years were reverting to a state of nature. Everybody who’d been holding their breath for the past five years was letting it out. Even socially anxious, authority-respecting students had begun conducting risky experiments with sass. The candlelit bubble-world was on a collision course with the hard and rocky rogue planet of reality, and when they hit the bubble would pop.
And it was all happening without Plum. She felt like she’d been born too soon—she was a sickly, withered preemie next to a bunch of healthy pink full-term babies.
Most of them already had postgraduation plans. Darcy was going to work for somebody who was working for a judge in the Wizard’s Court (that word, wizard, being an anachronism that cropped up mostly in legal contexts). Lucy was going to assist some possibly fraudulent but indisputably famous artist who constructed enormous invisible magical sculptures in the sky above the city. Wharton would be doing environmental stuff. Holly was part of a hard-core quasi-vigilante group bent on anticipating and averting violent crime among civilians.
The others were busy planning to give themselves over to pleasure, or if not pleasure then at least sloth. Life was already sorting them into categories, whether they liked it or not. All they could do was stare at each other dumbly across the widening gaps.
Plum found herself sorted into an extra ad hoc subcategory of one. Nobody felt comfortable asking her about life after her career-ending and, from their point of view, essentially life-ending disaster. So she volunteered that she was currently working with ex-Professor Quentin Coldwater on an Absolutely Fascinating Research Project the exact nature of which she couldn’t reveal.
Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip.
“Oh my God,” Darcy said, hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. Tell me you’re not sleeping with him. Lie to me if you have to, I just want to hear the words.”
“I’m not sleeping with him! Jesus, what an idea.” Fortunately Plum didn’t have to pretend to be appalled at the idea. Quentin was like her know-it-all older brother. “Who do you think I am?”