The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(20)

“Everyone take a marble, please, as you go.”

The very next afternoon March taught them a simple chant to say over their marbles in a crooked gypsy-sounding language that Quentin didn’t recognize (later Alice told him it was Estonian), accompanied by a tricky gesture that involved moving the middle and pinky fingers on both hands independently, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Those who completed it successfully could leave early; the rest had to stay until they got it right. How would they know when they got it right? They would know.

Quentin stayed until his voice was hoarse and his fingers were on fire, until the light in the windows had softened and changed color and then sunk away completely, until his empty stomach ached, and dinner had been served and cleared away in the distant dining room. He stayed until his face was warm with shame, and it was impossible to tellha0v with all but four other people had stood up—some of them pumped their fists in the air and said yesssss!!!—and left the classroom. Alice had been the first, after about twenty minutes, though she left silently. Finally Quentin said the chant and made the motions—he didn’t even know what he did differently this time—and was rewarded by the sight of his marble wobbling, very slightly but unmistakably, of its own volition.

He didn’t say anything, just put his head down on his desk, hiding his face in the crook of his elbow, and let the blood in his head throb in the darkness. The wooden desk was cool on his cheek. It hadn’t been a fluke, or a hoax, or a joke. He had done it. Magic was real, and he could do it.

And now that he could, my God, there was so much of it to do. That glass marble would be Quentin’s constant companion for the rest of the semester. It was the cold, pitiless glass heart of Professor March’s approach to magical pedagogy. Every lecture, every exercise, every demonstration was concerned with how to manipulate and transform it using magic. For the next four months Quentin was required to carry his marble everywhere. He fingered his marble under the table at dinner. It nestled in the inside pockets of his Brakebills jacket. When he showered, he tucked it in the soap dish. He took it to bed with him, and on those rare occasions when he slept he dreamed about it.

Quentin learned to cool his marble until it frosted over. He caused it to roll around a table by invisible means. He learned to float his marble in midair. He made it glow from within. Because it was already transparent it was easy to render invisible, upon which he promptly lost it and Professor March had to rematerialize it for him. Quentin made his marble float in water, pass through a wooden barrier, fly through an obstacle course, and attract iron filings like a magnet. This was nuts-and-bolts work, ground-level fundamentals. The dramatic spellcasting display Quentin had performed during his Exam, however showy and satisfying, he was told, was a well-understood anomaly, a flare-up of accumulated power that often manifested during a sorcerer’s first casting. It would be years before he could do anything comparable again.

In the meantime Quentin also studied the history of magic, about which even magicians knew less than he would have thought. It turned out that magic-users had always lived within mainstream society, but apart from it and largely unknown to it. The towering figures of magical history weren’t famous at all in the mundane world, and the obvious guesses were way off base. Leonardo, Roger Bacon, Nostradamus, John Dee, Newton—sure, all of them were mages of various stripes, but of relatively modest ability. The fact that they were famous in mainstream circles was just a strike against them. By the standards of magical society they’d fallen at the first hurdle: they hadn’t had the basic good sense to keep their shit to themselves.

Quentin’s other homework, Popper’s Practical Exercises for Young Magicians, turned out to be a thin, large-format volume containing a series of hideously complex finger and voice exercises arranged in order of increasing difficulty and painfulness. Much of spellcasting, Quentin gathered, consisted of very precise hand gestures accompanied by incantations to be spoken or chanted or whispered or yelled or sung. Any slight error in the movement or in the incantation would weaken, or negate, or pervert the spell.

This wasn’t Fillory. In each of the Fillory novels one or two of the Chatwin children were always taken under the wing of a kindly Fillorian mentor who taught them a skill or a craft. In The World in the Walls Martin becomes a master horseman and Helen trains as a kind of forest scout; in The Flying Forest Rupert becomes a deadeye archer; in A Secret Sea Fiona trains with a master fencer; and so on. The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Learning magic was nothing like that. It turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be. The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory, too. Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.

But there was something else to it, too, something beyond all the practicing and memorizing, beyond the dotted i’s and crossed t’s, something that never came up in March’s lectures. Quentin only sensed it, without really being able to talk about it, but there was something else you needed if a spell was going to get any purchase on the world around you. Whenever he tried to think about it he got lost in abstractions. It was something like force of will, a certain intensity of concentration, a clear vision, maybe a dash of artistic brio. If a spell was going to work, then on some gut level you had to mean it.