“This,” she said grandly, “is welters!”
Quentin was pretty much resigned to death by scorn. “So it’s a game.”
“Oh, it’s so much more than a game,” Gretchen said.
“It’s a passion,” Surendra said.
“It’s a lifestyle.”
“It’s a state of mind.”
“I can explain it to you, if you have about ten years.” Gretchen blew into her hands. “Basically one team stands at one end and one team stands at the other end and you try to capture squares.”
“How do you capture a square?”
Gretchen waggled her fingers in the air mysteriously. “With maaaaagic! ”
“Where’s the broomsticks?” Quentin was only half joking.
“No broomsticks. Welters is more like chess. They invented it about fifty million years ago. I think it was originally supposed to be a teaching aid. And some people say it was an alternative to dueling. Students kept killing each other, so they got them playing welters instead.”
“Those were the days.”
Surendra tried a standing long jump over a water square, but he slipped as he took off, shorted it, and caught one heel in the water.
“Shit!” He looked up at the freezing blue sky. “I hate welters!”
A crow took flight from the top of a winter elm. The sun was subsiding behind the trees in a frozen swirl of pink cirrus.
Surendra walked off the board, swinging his arms.
“I can’t feel my fingers. Let’s go in.”
They walked back down the path in the direction of the Sea, not talking, just blowing on their hands and rubbing them together. It was getting even colder as the sun went down. The trees were already black against the sky. They would have to hurry to change for dinner. A powerful feeling of late-afternoon futility was descending on Quentin. A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.
As they crossed the lawn Quentin found himself being quizzed about Eliot.
“So are you really friends with that guy?” Surendra said.
“Yeah, how do you even know him?”
“I don’t really. He mostly hangs out with his own crowd.” Quentin was secretly proud to be connected with Eliot, even if in reality they hardly spoke to each other anymore.
“Yeah, I know,” Surendra said. “The Physical Kids. What a bunch of losers.”
“What do you mean, Physical Kids?”
“You know, that whole clique. Janet Way and the fat one, Josh Hoberman—those guys. They all do physical magic for their Disciplines.”
In the Maze their white breath streamed up against the darkness of the box hedges. Surendra explained that starting with the Third Year students chose a specific magical topic to specialize in, or, more exactly, had it chosen for them by the faculty. Then students were divided into groups based on their specialties.
“It doesn’t matter that much, except that Disciplines map loosely to social groups—people tend to hang out mostly with their own kind. Physical’s supposed to be the rarest. They’re a little snobby about it, I guess. And anyway Eliot, you know about him.”
Gretchen raised her eyebrows and leered. His nose was red from having been out in the cold. By now they had reached the terrace, and the pink sunset was smeared anamorphically all over the wavy glass in the French doors.
“No, I don’t think I do know,” Quentin said stiffly. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“You don’t know?”
“Oh my God!” In ecstasy Gretchen put her hand on Surendra’s arm. “I bet he’s one of Eliot’s—!”
At that moment the French doors opened and Penny came striding quickly toward them, stiff-legged, his shirt untucked, no jacket on. His pale round face came looming up out of the dusk. His expression was blank and fixed, his walk hyperanimated by a crazy energy. As he got closer he took an extra little skip step, cocked his arm back, and punched Quentin in the face.
Fighting was almost unheard of at Brakebills. Students gossiped and politicked and sabotaged one another’s P.A. experiments, but actual physical violence was vanishingly rare. Back in Brooklyn Quentin had seen fights, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who got mixed up in them. He wasn’t a bully, and his height made it inconvenient for bullies to pick on him. He didn’t have any siblings. He hadn’t been seriously punched since elementary school.
There was a freeze-frame moment of Penny’s fist, close-up and huge, like a comet passing dangerously close to the Earth, and then a flashbulb went off in Quentin’s right eye. It was a straight shot, and he half spun away and brought up his hand to touch the spot in the universal gesture of I’ve-just-been-punched-in-the-face. He was still trying to get his mind around what had just happened when Penny hit him again. This time Quentin ducked enough that he caught it on his ear.
“Ow!” Quentin yelled, scrambling backward. “What the hell?”
Dozens of windows looked out on the terrace from the House, and Quentin had a blurred impression of rows of fascinated faces pressed up against them.
Surendra and Gretchen stared at Quentin in white-faced horror, their mouths open, as if what was happening were his fault. Penny obviously had some theatrical notions about how a fight should go, because he was bouncing on his feet and doing little fake jabs and weaving his head around like boxers in movies.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Quentin shouted at him, more shocked than hurt.
Penny’s jaw was clenched, and his breath hissed in and out between his teeth. There was saliva on his chin, and his eyes looked weird—the phrase “fixed and dilated” flashed through Quentin’s mind. Penny aimed a big roundhouse punch at Quentin’s head, and Quentin flinched away violently, ducking and covering his head with his arms. He recovered enough to grab Penny around the waist while he was still off balance.
They staggered back and forth like a pair of drunken waltzers, leaning on each other for support, then crashed into a shrubbery at the edge of the terrace. It dropped its payload of snow on them. Quentin was a couple of inches taller than Penny, and his arms were longer, but Penny was made of more solid stuff and could throw him around. A low stone bench cut them off at the knees, and they both fell over, Penny on top.
The back of Quentin’s head hit the stone terrace hard. Lightning flashed. It hurt, but at the same time it had the effect of sweeping away all of Quen tin’s fear, and most of his conscious thoughts, like somebody sweeping the dishes off a table with both arms. In their place it substituted blind rage.
They rolled over each other, both trying to get in a punch and grabbing at the other one’s arms so he couldn’t. There was blood: Penny had cut his forehead open somehow. Quentin wanted to get up so they could box. He wanted to deck Penny, lay him out flat. He was vaguely aware of an enraged Gretchen trying to hit Penny with her stick and hitting him instead.
He was on top and just about had his fist free for a good hard shot when he felt strong arms encircle his chest, almost tenderly, and lift him back and up. With Quentin’s weight off him Penny popped up on his toes like an electric toy, breathing hard, red running down his face, but there were people between them now, the crowd had enveloped them, Quentin was being pulled backward. The spell was broken. The fight was over.
The next hour was a jumble of unfamiliar rooms and people leaning down to talk to him earnestly and dab at his face with rough cloths. An older woman with an enormous bosom whom he’d never seen before worked a spell with cedar and thyme that made his face feel better. She put something cold that he couldn’t see on the back of his head where it hit the terrace, whispering in an unfamiliar Asian language. The throbbing faded some.
He still felt a little off—he wasn’t in pain, but it was like he was wearing deep-sea diving gear, clumping in slow motion through the hallways, heavy and weightless at the same time, brushing past the curious fish that peered at him and then quickly skittered away. The kids his age and younger r
egarded his battered face with awe—his ear was swollen, and he had a monster black eye. The older kids found the whole thing funny. Quentin decided to roll with the amusement. He did his best to project calm good humor. For a moment Eliot’s face swam in front of him with a look of sympathy that made Quentin’s eyes flood with hot tears that he viciously suppressed. It turned out it had been Eliot and those very same Physical Kids, speak of the devil, who had broken up the fight. Those powerful, gentle arms that pulled him off Penny belonged to Eliot’s friend Josh Hoberman—the fat one.
He’d missed most of dinner, so he sat down as they were serving dessert, which seemed consistent with the backward quality of the whole day. They waived the rule about late arrivals. He couldn’t shake the thickheaded feeling—he watched the world through a long-range lens, heard it through a tumbler pressed against a wall. He still hadn’t figured out what the fight had been about. Why would Penny hit him? Why would anybody do that? Why come to somewhere like Brakebills just to screw it up by being an asshole?
He figured he should probably eat something, but the first bite of flour-less chocolate cake turned to sticky glue in his mouth, and he had to sprint to make it to the bathroom before he threw up. At which point a massive gravitational field gripped him and pressed him roughly and irrevocably down against the grimy bathroom floor, as if a giant had slapped him down with his mighty hand and then, when he was down far enough, leaned on him with all his weight, smooshing him down into the cool, dirty tiles.
Quentin woke up in darkness. He was in bed, but not his own bed. His head hurt.
Woke up might have been putting it too strongly. The focus wasn’t sharp, and his brain wasn’t completely sure that its integrity was uncompromised. Quentin knew Brakebills had an infirmary, but he’d never been there before. He didn’t even know where it was. He’d passed through another secret portal, this time into the world of the sick and injured.
A woman was fussing over him, a pretty woman. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but he felt her cool, soft fingertips moving over his skull.
He cleared his throat, tasted something bitter.
“You’re the paramedic. You were the paramedic.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Past tense is better, that was a one-time performance. Though I won’t say I didn’t enjoy myself.”
“You were there. The day I came here.”
“I was there,” she agreed. “I wanted to make sure you made it to the Examination.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I come here sometimes.”
“I’ve never seen you here.”
“I make a point of not being seen.”
A long pause followed, during which he might have slept. But she was still there when he opened his eyes again.
“I like the hair,” he said.
She was no longer wearing her paramedic’s uniform, and her dark hair was up, held in place with chopsticks, revealing more of her small, jewel-like face. She had seemed so young before, and she didn’t look any different now, but he wondered. She had the gravity of a much older woman.
“Those braids were a bit much,” she said.
“That man who died—what really happened to him? Why did he die?”
“No special reason.” A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. “He wasn’t supposed to, he just did. People do.”
“I thought it might have something to do with my being there.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your sense of self-importance. Turn over on your stomach.”
Quentin did, and she dabbed the back of his head with a liquid that smelled sharply and stung.
“So it didn’t mean anything?”
“Death always means something. But no, nothing apart from the usual. There, all done. You have to take care of yourself, Quentin. We need you in fighting trim.”
He rolled onto his back again. His pillow had grown cool while she worked. He closed his eyes. He knew that a more alert Quentin would be working harder to zero in precisely on who she was, and what part she was playing in his story, or he in hers. But he couldn’t.
“That book you gave me,” he said. “I think I lost it. I didn’t have a chance to read it.”
In his depleted, borderline demented state the loss of the Fillory book suddenly seemed very sad, a tragedy beyond all possibility of redemption. A warm tear rolled down his cheek and into his ear.
“Hush,” she said. “It wasn’t time yet. You’ll find it again, if you look hard enough. That much I can promise you.”
It was the kind of thing people always said about Fillory. She placed something cool on his burning forehead, and he lost consciousness.
When he woke up again she was gone. But he wasn’t alone.
“You had a concussion,” somebody said.
It might have been the voice that finally woke him up. It had been calling his name. He recognized it, but he couldn’t place it. It was calm and familiar in a way he found comforting.
“Hey, Q. Q? Are you awake? Professor Moretti said you had a concussion.”
It was Penny’s voice. He could even see the pale oval of Penny’s face, propped up on pillows, across the aisle from him and one bed down.
“That’s why you threw up. It must have been when we fell over that bench. You hit your head on the ground.” All the crazy anger had drained out of Penny. He was positively chatty now.
“Yeah. I know I hit my head,” Quentin said slowly, thickly. “It was my head.”
“It won’t affect your mental functioning, if you’re wondering about that. That’s what Moretti said. I asked.”
“Well that’s a relief.”
A long silence passed. A clock ticked somewhere. There was a lovely sequence in the last Fillory book, The Wandering Dune, when little Jane, the youngest Chatwin, catches a bad cold and spends a week in bed talking to the Drawing Master on board the good ship Windswept, attended to by soft, sympathetic bunnies. Quentin had always liked Jane. She was different from the other Chatwins: more thoughtful, with an unpredictable sense of humor and a sharper edge than her slightly saccharine, Dick-and-Jane siblings.
He wondered what time it was.
“What about you?” he said numbly. He wasn’t so sure he was willing to make nice just yet. “Did you get hurt?”
“I cut open my forehead on your tooth. And you broke my nose when you head-butted me. They fixed it with a Pulaski’s Mending. I’ve never seen it done like that before, at least not on a human being. She used goat’s milk.”
“I didn’t even know I head-butted you.”
Penny was quiet again. Quentin counted thirty ticks of the clock.
“Do you have a black eye?” Penny said. “I can’t see.”
“Huge one.”
“Thought so.”
There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Quentin gulped it gratefully and fell back on the pillow. Hot veins of pain flashed through his head. Whatever the paramedic had done, or whoever she was, he still had some healing to do.
“Penny. Why the hell did you hit me like that?”
“Well, I think I had to,” Penny said. He sounded a little shocked that Quentin would even ask.
“You had to.” Maybe he wasn’t too tired after all. “But I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t do anything. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t do anything.” Penny chuckled woodenly. His voice was oddly cool, as if he’d rehearsed this speech, his closing argument, many times. Behind it Quentin could hear that weird manic anger ramping back up. “You could have talked to me, Quentin. You could have shown me a little respect. You and your little girlfriend.”
Oh, God. Was this really how it was going to be?
“Penny, who are you even talking about? Are you talking about Alice?”
“Oh, come on, Quentin. You sit there, you give each other little looks, you laugh at me. Openly. Would you believe I actually thought it was going to be fun? That we were all going to work together? Would you believe
I actually thought that?”
Quentin recognized Penny’s aggrieved tone. Once his parents had rented out the parlor floor of their brownstone to an apparently sane little man, an actuary, who had left them increasingly high-handed notes requesting that they stop videotaping him every time he took out the trash.
“Don’t be an ass,” Quentin said. He didn’t see this as a rise-above-it situation. What, was Penny going to come over and give him another concussion? “Do you even know what you look like to the rest of the world? You sit there with your big-ass punk attitude, and you expect people to come around begging to hang out with you?”
Penny was sitting up now.
“That night,” he said, “when you and Alice went off together. You didn’t apologize, you didn’t ask me, didn’t say goodbye, you just walked right out. And then, and then,” he finished triumphantly, “you passed? And I failed? How is that fair? How is that fair? What did you expect me to do?”
So that was it. “That’s right, Penny,” Quentin said. “You definitely should have hit me in the face because you didn’t pass a test. Why don’t you go hit Professor Van der Weghe, too?”
“I don’t take things lying down, Quentin.” Penny’s voice was very loud in the empty infirmary. “I don’t want trouble. But if you come after me, I swear to you that I will get right back in your face. That’s just how it works. You think this is your own private fantasy world? You think you can do whatever you want? You try to walk all over me, Quentin. I’m going to come right back at you!”
They were both talking so loudly that Quentin didn’t even notice when the infirmary door opened and Dean Fogg came in, dressed in an exquisitely embroidered silk kimono and a Dickensian nightcap. For a second Quentin thought he was holding a candle before he realized it was Fogg’s upraised index finger that was softly glowing.
“That’s enough,” he said quietly.
“Dean Fogg—” Penny began as if here, finally, was a voice of reason he could appeal to.
“I said that’s enough.” Quentin had never heard the Dean raise his voice, and he didn’t now. Fogg was always a faintly ridiculous figure in the daytime, but now, at night, wreathed in his kimono, in the alien confines of the infirmary, he looked powerful and otherworldly. Wizardly. “You’re not going to speak again except to answer my questions. Is that clear?”