The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(32)

Quentin recognized Penny’s aggrieved tone. Once his parents had rented out the parlor floor of their brownstone to an apparently sane little man, an actuary, who had left them increasingly high-handed notes requesting that they stop videotaping him every time he took out the trash.

“Don’t be an ass,” Quentin said. He didn’t see this as a rise-above-it situation. What, was Penny going to come over and give him another concussion? “Do you even know what you look like to the rest of the world? You sit there with your big-ass punk attitude and you expect people to come around begging to hang out with you?”

Penny was sitting up now.

“That night,” he said, “when you and Alice went off together. You didn’t apologize, you didn’t ask me, didn’t say good-bye, you just walked right out. And then, and then,” he finished triumphantly, “you Passed? And I Failed? How is that fair? How is that fair? What did you expect me to do?”

So that was it. “That’s right, Penny,” Quentin said. “You definitely should have hit me in the face because you didn’t pass a test. Why don’t you go hit Professor Van der Weghe, too?”

“I don’t take things lying down, Quentin.” Penny’s voice was very loud in the empty infirmary. “I don’t want trouble. But if you come after me, I swear to you that I will get right back in your face. That’s just how it works. You think this is your own private fantasy world? You think you can do whatever you want? You try to walk all over me, Quentin, I’m going to come right back at you!”

They were both talking so loudly that Quentin didn’t even notice when the infirmary door opened and Dean Fogg came in, dressed in an exquisitely embroidered silk kimono and a Dickensian nightcap. For a second Quentin thought he was holding a candle before he realized it was Fogg’s upraised index finger that was softly glowing.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly. that thing?”R centuriesv with

“Dean Fogg—” Penny began as if here, finally, was a voice of reason he could appeal to.

“I said, that’s enough.” Quentin had never heard the Dean raise his voice, and he didn’t now. Fogg was always a faintly ridiculous figure in the daytime, but now, at night, wreathed in his kimono, in the alien confines of the infirmary, he looked powerful and otherworldly. Wizardly. “You’re not going to speak again except to answer my questions. Is that clear?”

Did that count as a question? To be safe Quentin just nodded. His head hurt worse now.

“Yes, sir,” Penny said promptly.

“I have heard absolutely enough about this. Who instigated this appalling incident?”

“I did,” Penny said instantly. “Sir. Quentin didn’t do anything; he had nothing to do with it.”

Quentin said nothing. That was the funny thing about Penny. He was insane, but he did have his insane principles, and he stuck to them.

“And yet,” Fogg said, “somehow your nose found its way into the path of Quentin’s forehead. Will it happen again?”

“No, sir.”

“No.”

“All right.” Quentin heard springs chirp as the Dean sat down on an empty bed. He didn’t turn his head. “There is only one thing that pleases me about this afternoon’s altercation, which is that neither of you resorted to magic to hurt each other. Neither of you is advanced enough in your studies to understand this properly, but in time you will learn that wielding magic means working with enormously powerful energies. And controlling those energies requires a calm and dispassionate mind.

“Use magic in anger and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells … if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.”





THE PHYSICAL KIDS


SIX MONTHS LATER, in September, Quentin and Alice spent the first day of their Third Year at Brakebills sitting outside a small square Victorian outbuilding about a half mile from the House. It was a piece of pure folly architecture, a miniature house, white with a gray roof, complete with windows and gables, that might at one time have been servants’ quarters, or a guest cottage, or a largish garden shed.

There was a weathervane on top, wrought iron and shaped like a pig, that always pointed somewhere other than where the wind was blowing. Quentin couldn’t make out anything through the windows, but he thought he heard snatches of conversation coming from inside. The cottage stood on the edge of a wide hayfield.

It was midafternoon. The sky was blue and the early autumn sun was high. The air was silent and still. A rusted-out old piece of farm machinery stood half drowned in the same long grass it used to mow.

“This is bullshit. Knock again.”

“You knock,” Alice said. She released a convulsive sneeze. “I’ve been knocking for twenty … for twenty …”

She sneezed again. She was allergic to pollen.

“Bless you.”

“Twenty minutes. Thank you.” She blew her nose. “They’re in there, they just won’t open the door.”

“What do you think we should do?”

Quentin thought for a minute.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s a test.”