The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(57)
It was totally against the rules, but breaking the rules turned out to be as much fun as obeying them. How had he never figured that out before? The others were playing more and more wildly—they weren’t even trying to go after the chunk of ice anymore—and the game was disintegrating into little knots of tussling foxes, and he was tussling with Alice. Vulpine hormones and instincts were powering up, taking over, manhandling what was left of his rational human mind.
He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn’t seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. Something crazy and urgent was going on, and there was no way to stop it, or probably there was but why would you? Stopping was one of thoseem; margin-left:1.8em; margin-right:1.8em; text-align:justify; text-indent:m was happeninggo pointless, life-defeating human impulses for which his merry little fox brain had nothing but contempt.
He caught a glimpse of Alice’s wild dark fox’s eyes rolling with terror and then half shutting with pleasure. Their tiny quick breaths puffed white in the air and mingled and disappeared. Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.
The snow burned underneath them. It glowed hot like a bed of coals. They were on fire, and they let the fire consume them.
To an outside observer breakfast the next day wouldn’t have looked much different than it usually did. Everybody shuffled in in their loose-fitting, all-white Brakebills South uniforms, sat down without speaking or looking at one another, and ate what was put in front of them. But Quentin felt like he was walking on the moon. Giant slow-motion steps, ringing silence, vacuum all around him, a television audience of millions. He didn’t dare look at anybody else, least of all Alice.
She was sitting across the table and three people down from him, impassive and unperturbed, calmly focused on her oatmeal. He couldn’t have guessed within a light-year what she was thinking. Though he knew what was on everybody else’s minds. He was sure they all knew what had happened. They’d been right out in the open, for God’s sake. Or had they all been doing the same thing? Did everybody pair off? His face felt hot. He didn’t even know if she was a virgin. Or, if she had been, whether she still was one.
It would all be so much simpler if he even understood what it meant, but he didn’t. Could he be in love with Alice? He tried to compare what he felt for her with his remembered feelings for Julia, but the two emotions were worlds apart. Things just got out of control, that’s all. It wasn’t them, it was their fox bodies. Nobody had to take it too seriously.
Mayakovsky sat at the head of the table looking smug. He had known this was going to happen, Quentin thought furiously, stabbing at his cheese grits with a fork. A bunch of teenagers cooped up in the Fortress of Solitude for two months, then stuck in the bodies of stupid horny mammals. Of course we were going to go crazy.
Whatever perverted personal satisfaction Mayakovsky got out of what happened, it became obvious over the next week that it was also a practical piece of personnel management, because Quentin reapplied himself to his magical studies with the laserlike focus of a person desperate to avoid meeting anybody else’s eyes or thinking about things that actually mattered, like how he really felt about Alice, and who it was who had had sex with her out on the ice, him or the fox. It was back to the grind, pounding his way through Circumstances and Exceptions and a thousand mnemonics designed to force him to embed a thousand trivial particles of data in the soft tissue of his already supersaturated mind.
They fell into a collective tribal trance. The depleted palette of the Antarctic world hypnotized them. The shifting snows outside briefly revealed a low ridge of dark shale, the only topographical feature in a featureless world, and the students watched it from the roof like television. It reminded him of the desert in The Wandering Dune—God, he hadn’t thought about Fillory for ages. Quentin wondered if the rest of the world, his life before this, had just been a lurid dream. When he pictured the globe now it was entirely Antarctic, a whole world over which this monochromatic continent had metastasized like an icy cancer. that thing?”Rwo weeksv with
He went a little insane. They all did, though it took them in different ways. Some of the others became obsessed with sex. Their higher functions were so numb and exhausted they became animals, desperate for any kind of contact that wouldn’t ask words of them. Impromptu orgies were not unheard of. Quentin came upon them once or twice in the evenings—they would gather in apparently arbitrary combinations, in an empty classroom or in somebody’s bedroom, in semi-anonymous chains, their white uniforms half or all the way off, their eyes glassy and bored as they pulled and stroked and pumped, always in silence. He saw Janet take part once. The display was as much for other people as for themselves, but Quentin never joined in or even watched, just turned away, feeling superior and also strangely angry. Maybe he was just angry that something kept him from jumping in. He was disproportionately relieved that he never saw Alice there.
Time passed, or at least Quentin knew that, according to theory, it pretty much had to be passing, though he didn’t personally see much evidence of it, unless you counted the weird menagerie of mustaches and beards he and his male classmates were growing. However much he ate he got thinner and thinner. His state of mind devolved from mesmerized to hallucinatory. Tiny random things became charged with overwhelming significance—a round pebble, a stray straw from a broom, a dark mark on a white wall—that dissipated again minutes later. In the classroom he sometimes saw fantastical creatures mixed in with his classmates—a huge, elegant brown stick insect that clung to the back of a chair; a giant lizard with horny skin and a German accent, whose head burned with white fire—though afterward he could never be sure if he had imagined them. Once he thought he saw the man whose face was hidden by a branch. He couldn’t take this much longer.