The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(48)
Josh let go of him and stalked off in the direction of the Maze. Quentin caught up with him.
“So you thought Lovelady could help.”
“I thought he could … I don’t know.” Josh shrugged helplessly. “Give me a little boost. Just make it so I could count on it a little more.”
“By selling you some trash he got off eBay.”
“You know, he has interesting connections.” Just like that Josh was finding his good humor again. He always did. “They act all superior when we’re watching, but some of the faculty buy from Lovelady. I heard a couple of years ago Van der Weghe bought an old brass door knocker off him that turned out to be a Hand of Oberon. Chambers uses it to cut down trees around the Sea.
“I thought he could sell me a charm. Something to bring my grades up. I know I act like I don’t care, but I want to stay here, Quentin! I don’t want to go back out there!”
He pointed off in the general direction of the outside world. The grass was wet and half frozen, and the Sea was misty.Alice?”b respectv with
“I want you to stay, too,” Quentin said. His anger was going. “But Lovelady—Jesus, maybe you are an idiot. Why didn’t you just go to Eliot for help?”
“Eliot. He’s the last guy I’d talk to. Don’t you see how he looks at me in class? A guy like that—okay, he’s had it tough, in lots of ways, but this isn’t the kind of thing he understands.”
“What did Lovelady try to sell you?”
“Bunch of old dust bunnies. Bastard told me they were Aleister Crowley’s ashes.”
“What were you going to do with them anyway? Snort them?”
They pushed their way through the scrim of trees around the field. It was a grim scene. Eliot and Janet were huddled at one end of the board looking bedraggled and thoroughly chilled. Poor Alice was out on the board, squatting on a stone square and hugging herself miserably. The Natural Magic group was at the other end; despite the Physical Kids’ shortfall, they had chosen to field the full five players. Not very sportsmanlike. It was hard to see their faces—in an effort to intimidate their opponents they wore hooded druid robes that somebody had sewn together out of green velvet curtains. They weren’t made to get wet.
The Physical Kids gave a ragged cheer when Josh and Quentin appeared.
“My heroes,” Janet said sarcastically. “Where did you find him?”
“Somewhere warm and dry,” Josh said.
They were being beaten badly, but Josh’s surprise reappearance revived their fighting spirit. On his first turn Josh went for the silver square, and after five solid minutes of Gregorianesque chanting he improbably brought into being a fiery elemental—a slow-moving, woodchuck-size salamander that looked like it was constructed out of glowing orange embers, and which went on to laconically capture two adjacent squares for good measure. It then settled down on its six legs to smolder and watch the rest of the match, raindrops sizzling and skating off its charred scales.
The Physical Kids’ comeback had the unfortunate effect of lengthening the game beyond all possibility of enjoyment. It was the longest game they’d played all season; it was shaping up to be the longest welters game anybody could remember. Finally after another hour the handsome, Scandinavian-looking captain of the Natural team—whom Quentin was pretty sure Janet used to date—toed the edge of the sand square he stood on, gathered his wet velvet robe around him regally, and caused an elegantly twisted little olive tree to curl up out of a grass square in the Physicals’ home row.
“Suck it!” he said.
“That’s the win,” Professor Foxtree called from the judge’s chair. He was visibly catatonic from boredom. “Unless you Physicals can match it. If not, then thislled the thing
MARIE BYRD LAND
QUENTIN HAD BEEN wondering about the mystery of the Fourth Year ever since he got to Brakebills. Everybody did. The basic facts were common knowledge: every year in September half the Fourth Years swiftly and silently disappeared from the House overnight. No one discussed their absence. The vanished Fourth Years reappeared at the end of December looking thin and drawn and generally chewed over, to no particular comment that at first Quentin didn’ morning hesitated the faculty—it was considered fatally bad form to say anything about it. They quietly mixed back into the general Brakebills population, and that was that. The rest of the Fourth Years vanished in January and came back at the end of April.
Now the first semester of Quentin’s Fourth Year was almost over, and he had acquired not one single new piece of information about what happened during that interval. The secret of where they went and what they did there, or what was done to them, was improbably well kept. Even students who took nothing else at Brakebills seriously were passionately serious on that one point: “Dude, I’m not even kidding, you so don’t want to be asking me about that …”
The disaster of the Beast had thrown off the previous year’s schedule. The regular contingent of Fourth Years had departed for the first semester—they were gone when it happened—but the second semester group, which included Eliot, Janet, and Josh, had finished out the year at Brakebills as usual. To the extent that they speculated about it, they called themselves “the Spared.” Apparently whatever the faculty had in store for them was nasty enough as it was without the added threat of assault by an interdimensional carnivore.