The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(37)

There were only five of them, counting himself and Alice. Eliot was there, scanning one of the bookshelves and acting like he hadn’t noticed them yet. He seemed to be trying to make a serious argument about magical theory to somebody, but nobody was listening.

“Tinkerbell, we have guests,” Janet said. “Please turn round and face the room.” She was lean and animated, with a serious, somewhat anachronistic pageboy haircut. She was the loud one: Quentin had seen her holding forth to the others on walks through the Maze and making speeches over dinner in the dining room.

Eliot broke off his monologue and turned round. He was wearing an apron.

“Hello,” he said, not missing a beat. “Glad you could make it. Alice, I understand you burned our door in half.”

“Quentin helped.”

“We watched you through the window,” Josh said. “You’re hella lucky Brzezinski didn’t catch you with that axe.”

“What’s the correct solution?” Alice asked. “I mean, I know it worked, but there must be a better way.”

She took a timid sip of her wine, immediately followed by a less timid one.

“There isn’t one,” Janet said. “Or not a good one, anyway. That’s part of the point. This is Physical Magic. It’s messy. It’s crude. As long as you don’t knock the building down, it counts. And if you did it would probably still count.”

“How did you do it?” Alice asked every once in a while. b transformv with shyly. “I mean, when it was your turn?”

“Froze and shattered it. I do a special kind of cold magic, that’s my Discipline. Sixty-three minutes. And that is a record.”

“It used to be you could say ‘friend’ in Elvish and it would let you in,” Josh said. “Now too many people have read Tolkien.”

“Eliot, darling, I think our dinner must be ready,” Janet said. Her attitude toward Eliot was hard to read, a weird combination of contempt and tenderness. She clapped her hands. “Josh, maybe you could do something about …?” She gestured in the direction of the half-demolished door. “The mosquitoes are getting in.”

Still dazed, Quentin trailed Eliot into the kitchen, which was, again, larger and nicer than really seemed plausible from the outside, with white cabinets up to the high ceiling and soapstone counters and an aerodynamic-looking 1950s refrigerator. Eliot sloshed some wine from his glass into a pan of red sauce on the stove.

“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.”

He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that he’d ignored Quentin for the past year. It was like it never happened.

“So you have this whole place to yourself?” Quentin didn’t want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here.

“Pretty much. So do you, now.”

“Do all the Disciplines have their own clubhouses?”

“It’s not a clubhouse,” Eliot said sharply. He dumped a huge clump of fresh pasta into a tall pot of boiling water and stirred it to break it up. “This’ll cook in about a minute flat.”

“Then what is it?”

“Well, all right, it is a clubhouse. But don’t call it that. We call it the Cottage. We have the seminars here, and the library isn’t bad. Sometimes Janet paints in the bedroom upstairs. Only we can get in here, you know.”

“What about Fogg?”

“Oh, and Fogg, though he never bothers. And Bigby. You know Bigby, right?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I can’t believe you don’t know Bigby!” Eliot said, chuckling. “God, you’re going to love Bigby.”

He tasted the sauce, then glugged in a slug of heavy cream and stirred it in in widening circles. The sauce paled and thickened. Eliot had a jaunty, offhanded confidence at the stove.

“All the groups have a place like this. The Naturals have this deeply lame treehouse off in the forest. The Illusionists have a house just like this one, though only they know where it is. You have to find it to get in. Knowledge just has the library, the poor suckers. And Healing has the clinic—”

“Eliot!” Janet’s voice came from the other room. “We’re starving.” Quentin wondered how Alice was faring out there.

“All right, all right! I hope you don’t mind pasta,” he added, to Quentin. “It’s all I made. There’s bruschetta out there, or there was. At least there’s lots of wine.” He drained the Alice?”b transformv with pasta in the sink, sending up a huge gout of steam, and dumped it into the pan to finish in the sauce. “God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?

“Richard was the real cook around here. I don’t know if you knew him; he graduated last year. Tall. Total grind, made us all look bad in front of Bigby, but at least he could cook. Grab those two bottles there, would you? And the corkscrew?”

With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware, some of which bordered on light hand-to-hand weaponry, the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. The food was simple but not at all bad. He’d forgotten he was starving. Janet performed a trick—Quentin wasn’t sure whether it was magical or just mechanical—to shorten the long seminar table into a dinner table.