The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(83)

Eliot had dragged a pair of ottomans over to the table. He reclined on them Roman-style, though they were too low, so he had to reach up to get his drink, and all Quentin could see of him was his groping hand. Janet lay down, too, spooned up contentedly behind him.

“Cof“Cheese,” Eliot said. “Do we have cheese? I need cheese.”

On cue Peggy Lee wandered through the opening verse of “Is That All There Is?” on the stereo. Which would be worse, Quentin wondered, if Richard was right, and there was an angry moral God, or if Eliot was right, and there was no point at all? If magic were created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it? Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out here. There was nothing to hang on to. They couldn’t go on like this forever.

“There’s a Morbière in the kitchen,” he said. “It was supposed to go with the theme—you know, the two layers, the morning milking, the night milking …”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Janet said. “Fetch, Q. Go on.”

“I’ll go,” Eliot said, but instead of standing up he just rolled weakly off the couch and fell on the floor. His head made an ominously loud bonk as it hit the parquet floor.

But he was laughing as Quentin and Janet picked him up, Quentin getting his shoulders t when he impl





PENNY’S STORY

HE HAD A new mohawk, a proud, iridescent green ruff an inch wide and three inches high, like the crest of a centurion’s helmet. He had also gained weight—he looked, oddly, younger and softer than he had at Brakebills: less like a lone Iroquois warrior and more like an overfed white suburban gangsta. But it was still Penny who was catching his breath on the Oriental rug and looking around at everything like a curious, judgmental rabbit. He wore a black leather jacket with chrome spikes on it, faded black jeans, and a grubby white T-shirt. Jesus, Quentin thought. Do they even have punks anymore? He must be the last one in New York.

Penny sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Neither of them spoke. Quentin knew enough to know that Penny would never stoop to petty social pleasantries like saying hello and asking how he’d been and explaining what the hell he was doing here. Just this once Quentin was grateful. He didn’t know if he could face it.

“How’d you get in here?” Quentin croaked. His mouth was parched.

“Your doorman was asleep. You should really fire him.”

“It’s not my doorman.” He cleared his throat laboriously. “You must have cast something.”

“Just Cholmondeley’s Stealth.” Penny gave it the correct English pronunciation: Chumley’s.

“Eliot has a ward on this whole floor. I helped him set it up. Plus you need a key for the elevator.”

“We’ll need to set a new ward. I unpicked it on the way up.”

“Fucking—Okay, first, who’s we? We who?” Quentin said. At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment’s grace to immerse his face in a sinkfull of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned. “And second, Penny, Jesus, it took us a whole weekend to put up that ward.”

He did a quick check: Penny was right, the defensive spells around the apartment were gone, so gone that they hadn’t even alerted him when they were going. Quentin couldn’t quite believe it. Penny must have taken down their ward from the outside, on the fly, from a standing start, in no more time than it took him to ride up ten floors in an elevator. Quentin kept his face blank—he didn’t want to give Penny the satisfaction of seeing how impressed he was.

“What about the key?”

Penny dug it out of his jacket pocket and tossed it to Quentin.

“Took it off your doorman.” He shrugged. “Kind of thing you learn on the street.”

Quentin was going to say something about how the “street” in question was probably not a street at all but a way or a lane located in some gated community, and anyway it wasn’t that hard to steal a key from a sleeping doorman when you were rocking Cholmondeley’s Stealth, but it just seemed so unimportant, and the words were just too heavy to get out of his mouth, like they were stone blocks in his stomach that he would have had to physically cough up and regurgitate. Fuck Penny, he was wasting time. He had to talk to Alice.

But by then people had heard Penny’s voice. Richard came shambling in from the kitchen, where he’d been cleaning up, already awake and irritQuentin realized he would have to get dressed and deal with this. Daylight was here, and with it had come the world of appearances and lies and acting like everything was fine. They were all going to make scrambled eggs and talk about how hung-over they were and drink mimosas and Bloody Marys with extra Tabasco and black pepper and act like nothing was wrong, as if Quentin hadn’t just broken Alice’s heart for no better reason than that he was drunk and felt like it. And as unbelievable, as unthinkable as it seemed, they were going to listen to what Penny had to say.

He was a year behind Quentin and Alice, but by the end of his fourth year Penny had decided—he explained, once his audience was assembled and dressed and arranged around him in the living room with drinks and plates, standing or lying full length on couches or sitting cross-legged on the floor as their physical and emotional conditions permitted—that Brakebills had taught him everything it was going to teach him, so he dropped out and moved to a small town in Maine, a few miles north of Bar Harbor. The town was called Oslo, a seedy little resort village with a population that shrank by 80 percent in the off-season.