The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(43)

A week after the incident Amanda Orloff’s parents came to collect her things. No special fuss was made over them, at their request, but Quentin happened by one afternoon while they were saying good-bye to the Dean. All of Amanda’s belongings fit into one trunk and one pathetically small paisley-fabric suitcase.

Quentin’s heart seized up as he watched them. He was sure they could see his guilt; he felt like he was covered in it, sticky with it. But they ignored him. Mr. and Mrs. Orloff looked more like siblings than husband and wife: both six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with dishwater hair, his high and tight, hers in a businesslike shag. They seemed to be walking in a daze—Dean Fogg was guiding them by the elbows around something Quentin couldn’t see—and it took him a minute to figure out that they were heavily enchanted, so that even now they wouldn’t understand the nature of the school that their daughter had attended.

That August the Physical Kids straggled back from summer vacation early. They spent the week before classes camping out in the Cottage, playing pool and not studying and making a project out of drinking their way jigger by jigger through an old and viscous and thoroughly disgusting decanter of port Eliot had found at the back of a cabinet in the kitchen. But the mood was sober and subdued. Incredibly, Quentin was now a Fourth Year at Brakebills. “We have to have a welters team,” Janet announced one day.

“No,” Eliot said, “we don’t.”

He lay with one arm over his face on an old leather couch. They were in the library in the Cottage, exhausted from having done nothing all day.

“Yes, actually we do, Eliot.” She nudged him sharply in the ribs with her foot. “Bigby told me. There’s a tournament. Everybody has to play. They just haven’t announced it yet.”

“Shit,” Eliot, Alice, Josh, and Quentin all said in unison.

“I call equipment manager,” Alice added.

“Why?” Josh moaned. “Why are they doing this to us? Why, God?”

“It’s for morale,” Janet said. “Fogg says our spirits need elevating after last year. Organized welters is part of a ‘return to normalcy.’”

“My morale was fine until a minute ago. Fu every once in a while. b respectv with ck, I can’t stand that game, It’s a perversion of good magic. A perversion, I say!” Josh waved a finger at nobody in particular.

“Too bad, it’s compulsory. And it’s by Discipline, so we’re a team. Even Quentin”—she patted his head—“who still doesn’t have one.”

“Thanks for that.”

“I vote Janet captain,” Eliot said.

“Of course I’m captain. And as captain it is my happy duty to inform you that your first practice is in fifteen minutes.”

Everybody groaned and stirred and then settled themselves more comfortably where they were.

“Janet?” Josh said. “Stop doing this.”

“I’ve never even played,” Alice said. “I don’t know the rules.”

She lay on the rug paging limply through an old atlas. It was full of ancient maps in which the seas were populated with lovingly engraved marginal monsters, though in these maps the proportions were inverted, and the monsters were far larger and more numerous than the continents. Alice had acquired a pair of uncharacteristically hip rectangular glasses over the summer.

“Oh, you’ll pick it right up,” Eliot said. “Welters is fun—and educational!”

“Don’t worry.” Janet leaned down and gave the back of Alice’s head a maternal kiss. “Nobody really knows the rules.”

“Except Janet,” Josh said.

“Except me. I’ll see you all there at three.”

She flounced happily out of the room.

In the end it came down to the fact that none of them had anything better to do, which Janet had clearly been counting on. They reassembled by the welters board looking bedraggled and unpromising in the baking summer heat. It was so bright out you could barely stand to look at the grass. Eliot clutched the sticky decanter of port, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up. Just seeing it made Quentin feel dehydrated. Blue summer sky blazed in the water squares. A grasshopper collided with Quentin’s pants and clung there.

“So,” Janet said, climbing the ladder to the weather-beaten wooden judge’s chair in her perilously short skirt. “Who knows how we start?”

Starting, it emerged, involved picking a square and throwing a stone called the globe onto it. The stone was rough marble, bluish in color—it did look a little like a globe—and about the size of a ping-pong ball, though it was weirdly heavy. Quentin turned out to be unexpectedly talented at this feat, which was performed at various times during the game. The real trick was to avoid plunking it into a water square, in which case the game was forfeit, plus it was a pain to fish the globe out of the water.

Alice and Eliot were on the same team, facing off against Josh and Quentin, with Janet refereeing. Janet wasn’t the most assiduous student of the Physical Kids—that was Alice—or the most naturally gifted—Eliot—but she was ferally competitive, and she’d decided to acquire a total command of the technical intricacies of welters, which really was an amazingly complicated game.

“Without me you people would be lost!” Janet said, and it was true.