The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(17)
“And five”—he stuck up his thumb—“some people have all that stuff and they still can’t do it. Nobody knows why. They say the words, wave their arms, and nothing happens. Poor bastards. But that’s not us. We’re the lucky ones. We have it, whatever it is.”
“I don’t know if I have the moral fiber one.”
“I don’t either. I think that one’s optional, actually.”
Silent for a while, they walked along a lush, ruler-straight allée of fence trees leading back toward the lawn. Eliot lit another cigarette.
“Listen, I don’t want to pry,” Quentin said, “but I’m assuming you have some secret magical way of dealing with the negative health effects of all those cigarettes.”
“It’s kind of you to ask. I sacrifice a virgin schoolgirl every other fortnight by the light of a gibbous moon, using a silver scalpel forged by Swiss albinos. Who are also virgins. Clears my little lungs right up.”
After that Quentin saw Eliot most days. Eliot spent one entire afternoon teaching him how to navigate the hedge maze that separated the House—“as everybody calls it”—from the great lawn, which was officially named Seagrave’s Lawn after the eighteenth-century dean who cleared and leveled it, and which “everybody” referred to as the Sea, or sometimes the Grave. There were six fountains scattered throughout the maze (the Maze), and each one had an official name, usually that of a deceased dean, as well as a nickname generated by the collective unconsciousness of generations of Brakebillian undergraduates. The hedges that made up the Maze were cut in the shape of heavy, slow-thighed beasts—bears and elephants and other less-easily-identifiable creatures. Unlike ordinary topiary they moved: they lumbered along very slowly, almost imperceptibly, wading half submerged in the dark foliage like hippopotami wallowing in an equatorial African river.
On the last day before classes began, Eliot led him around to the front of the House, which looked out o every once in a while. b gon the Hudson. There was a scrim of plane trees between the front terrace and the river and a flight of wide stone steps that led down to a handsome Victorian boathouse. They decided on the spot that they absolutely had to go out on the water, even though neither of them had any practical ideas about how to do it. As Eliot pointed out, they were both certified sorcerer-geniuses, and how hard could it be to row a damn boat?
With a lot of grunting and yelling at each other, they wrestled a long wooden double scull down from the rafters. It was a fabulous object, strangely light, like the husk of a colossal stick insect, wreathed in cobwebs and redolent with the heady smell of wood varnish. Mostly by luck they managed to turn it over and splash it down into the water without injuring it or themselves or getting so pissed off at each other that they had to abandon the whole project. After some early close calls they got it pointed in a plausible direction and settled into a slow, halting rhythm with it, hindered but not daunted by their incompetence and by the fact that Quentin was hopelessly out of shape and Eliot was both out of shape and a heavy smoker.
They got about half a mile upstream before the summer day abruptly vanished around them and became chilly and gray. Quentin thought it was a summer squall until Eliot explained that they’d reached the outer limits of whatever concealment spells had been applied to the Brakebills grounds, and it was November again. They wasted twenty minutes rowing up past the change and then drifting back down again, up and back, watching the sky change color, feeling the temperature drop and then soar and then drop again.
They were too tired to row on the way back, so they drifted with the current. Eliot lay back in the scull and smoked and talked. Because of his air of infallible entitlement Quentin assumed he’d been raised among the wealthy mandarins of Manhattan, but it turned out he’d actually grown up on a farm in eastern Oregon.
“My parents are paid not to grow soybeans,” he said. “I have three older brothers. Magnificent physical specimens—kind-hearted, thick-necked, three-sport athletes who drink Schlitz and feel sorry for me. My dad doesn’t know what happened. He thinks he chewed too much dip before I was conceived, and that’s why I ‘di’n’t come out reg’lar.’” Eliot stubbed out his Merit in a glass ashtray balanced precariously on the glossy wooden hull and lit another one. “They think I’m at a special school for computer geeks and homosexuals.
“That’s why I don’t go home in the summertime. Henry doesn’t care. I haven’t been home since I started here.
“You probably feel sorry for me,” he went on s="bodytext" a
MAGIC
“THE STUDY OF magic is not a science, it is not an art, and it is not a religion. Magic is a craft. When we do magic, we do not wish and we do not pray. We rely upon our will and our knowledge and our skill to make a specific change to the world.
“This is not to say that we understand magic, in the sense that physicists understand why subatomic particles do whatever it is that they do. Or perhaps they don’t understand that yet, I can never remember. In any case, we do not and cannot understand what magic is, or where it comes from, any more than a carpenter understands why a tree grows. He doesn’t have to. He works with what he has.
“With the caveat that it is much more difficult and much more dangerous and much more interesting to be a magician than it is to be a carpenter.”