The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(12)

“I don’t really get what you mean,” Quentin said slowly, in the silence, like he’d forgotten his line in the school play and had to ask for it. “What do you mean, real magic?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Fogg shot wraith, a wisp of warm flesh and thenov o a hilarious sideways glance at the other teachers. “I don’t know what I mean. You tell me what I mean.”

Quentin shuffled a couple more times, stalling. He didn’t know what to do. He would do anything if they would just tell him what he was supposed to do. This was it, he thought, he was coming to the end. This is what failure feels like. He looked around the room, but every face was either blank or avoiding his gaze. No one was going to help him. He was going back to Brooklyn. Maddeningly, he could feel tears pooling in his eyes. He blinked them away. He so badly wanted not to care, but he was falling backward, sinking down inside himself, and there was nothing there to catch him. This is it, he thought. This was the test he couldn’t pass. It wasn’t really all that surprising. He just wondered how long they were going to let it go on.

“Stop f*cking with us, Quentin!” Fogg barked. He snapped his fingers. “Come on. Wake up!”

He reached across the table and grabbed Quentin’s hands roughly. The contact was a shock. His fingers were strong and strangely dry and hot. He was moving Quentin’s fingers, physically forcing them into positions they didn’t want to be in.

“Like this,” he was saying. “Like this. Like this.”

“Okay, stop,” Quentin said. He tried to pull away. “Stop.”

But Fogg didn’t stop. The audience shifted uncomfortably, and somebody said something. Fogg kept on working Quentin’s hands with both of his, kneading them. He bent Quentin’s fingers back, stretching them apart so that the webs between his fingers burned. Light seemed to flash between their hands.

“I said, stop it!” Quentin jerked his hands away.

It was surprising how good the anger felt. It was something to grab on to. In the shocked silence that followed he took a deep breath and forced it out through his nose. When it was out he felt like he’d expelled some of his despair with it. He’d had enough of being judged. He’d been sucking it up his whole life, but even he had his limit.

Fogg was talking again, but now Quentin wasn’t even listening. He had begun to recite something under his breath, something familiar. It took him a second to realize that the words he was mouthing weren’t English; they were from the foreign language he had invented earlier that afternoon. It was an obscure language—he’d decided—indigenous to a single tropical archipelago, a languorous hot-weather paradise, a Gauguin painting, blessed with black sand beaches and breadfruit trees and freshwater springs and endowed with an angry, glowing red volcano god and an oral culture rich in expletives. He spoke this language fluently, with no accent, like a native. The words he spoke were not a prayer, exactly. More of an incantation.

Quentin stopped shuffling the cards. There was no going back. Everything snapped into very slow, slow motion, as if the room had filled up with a viscous but perfectly clear liquid in which everyone and everything floated easily and calmly. Everyone and everything except for Quentin, who moved quickly. With two hands together, as if he were releasing a dove, he tossed the deck of cards lightly up to the ceiling. The deck broke apart and scattered in flight, like a meteorite losing cohesion in the atmosphere, and as the cards fluttered back down to earth they stacked themselves on the tabletop. They formed a house of cards. It was a recognizable, if impressionistic, model of the building they were sitting in that thing?” this nv o. The cards fell as if by chance, but each one perfectly, snapping into place magnetically, edge to edge, one after another. The last two, the aces of spades and hearts, leaned up against each other to make the roof over the clock tower.

Now the room was absolutely still. Dean Fogg sat as if he were frozen in place. All the hairs were standing up on Quentin’s arms, but he knew what he was doing. His fingers left almost imperceptible phosphorescent trails behind them in the air. He definitely felt high. He leaned forward and blew lightly on the card house, and it collapsed back down into a neatly stacked deck. He turned the deck over and fanned it out on the table like a blackjack dealer. Every card was a queen—all the standard suits, plus other suits that didn’t exist, in different colors, green and yellow and blue. The Queen of Horns, the Queen of Clocks, the Queen of Bees, the Queen of Books. Some were clothed; some were shamelessly naked. Some of them had Julia’s face; some of them had the lovely paramedic’s.

Dean Fogg watched Quentin intently. Everybody watched him. Watch this: Quentin squared the deck again and with no particular effort ripped it in half and then ripped the halves in half and tossed the resulting confetti at the assembled company, who all flinched except for Fogg.

He stood up. His chair fell over backward.

“Tell me where I am,” Quentin said softly. “Tell me what I’m doing here.”

He picked up the stack of nickels in his fist, only it was no longer a stack of coins; it was the hilt of a bright, burning sword that he drew easily out of the tabletop, as if it had been left there buried up to the hilt.

“Tell me what’s going on here,” Quentin said, louder, to the room. “And if this place isn’t Fillory, then for f*ck’s sake will somebody please tell me where the hell I am?”