The place was completely deserted. He hadn’t expected a formal reception, exactly, but he had to wander around for twenty minutes, through empty hallways and drawing rooms and classrooms and out onto terraces, before the white-gloved butler who’d served him his sandwich yesterday finally found him and deposited him in the Dean’s office, which was surprisingly small and mostly taken up by a presidential desk the size of a panzer tank. The walls were lined with an assortment of books and old-looking brass instruments.
The Dean arrived a minute later wearing a light green linen suit and a yellow tie. He was brusque and peppy and showed no sign of embarrassment, or any other emotion, relating to the scene the night before. He had already had breakfast, Fogg explained, but Quentin would eat while they talked.
“Now.” He clapped his hands on his knees and quirked his eyebrows. “First things first: magic is real. But you’ve probably already gotten that far.”
Quentin said nothing. He kept his face, his whole body, carefully still in his chair. He looked at a spot over Fogg’s shoulder. He was giving nothing away. Certainly it was the simplest possible explanation for what had happened last night. Part of him, the part he trusted least, wanted to leap on this idea like a puppy on a ball. But in light of everything else that had ever happened to him, in his entire life, he checked himself. He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn’t going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you’d buried and mourned wasn’t really dead after all.
He let Fogg talk.
“To answer your questions of last night, you are at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.” The butler arrived with a tray crowded with covered dishes, which he busily uncovered, like a room-service waiter. “Based on your performance in the Examination yesterday, we’ve decided to offer you a place here. Try the bacon, it’s very good. Local farm, they raise the pigs on cream and walnuts.”
“You want me to go to school here. College.”
“Yes. You’d come here instead of matriculating at a conventional university. If you like it, you can even keep the room you stayed in last night.”
“But I can’t just—” Quentin didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence. “I’m sorry, this is a little confusing. So I would put off college?”
“No, Quentin. You wouldn’t put off college. You would abandon college. Brakebills would be your college.” The Dean had obviously had a lot of practice at this. “There would be no Ivy League for you. You wouldn’t go off to school with the rest of your class. You would never make Phi Beta Kappa or be recruited by a hedge fund or a management consultancy. This isn’t summer school, Quentin. This is”—he pronounced the phrase precisely, eyes wide—“ ‘the whole shebang.’ ”
“So it’s four years—”
“Five, actually.”
“—at the end of which I get what? A bachelor’s of magic?” It was actually funny. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” he said to nobody.
“At the end of which you will be a magician, Quentin. It is not the obvious career path, I know. Your guidance counselor would not approve. No one will know what you’re doing here. You would be leaving all that behind. Your friends, whatever career plans you had, everything. You would be losing one world but gaining another. Brakebills would become your world. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly.”
Well, no, it wasn’t. Quentin pushed his plate away and crossed his arms. He stalled.
“So, how did you find me?”
“Oh, we have a device for that, a globe.” Fogg indicated a shelf holding a whole menagerie of them: modern globes; blackwater globes; pale lunar globes; glittering midnight-blue celestial globes; dark, smoky, unreadable globes awash with ludicrously inaccurate continents. “It finds young people like yourself who have an aptitude for magic—essentially it senses magic being performed, often inadvertently, by unregistered sorcerers, of which you are one. I suppose it must have picked up that Wandering Nickel trick of yours.
“We have scouts, too,” he added. “Your odd friend Ricky with the whiskers is one.” He touched his jawline where Ricky’s Amish beard was.
“What about that woman I met, with the braids. The paramedic. Was she a scout, too?”
Fogg frowned. “With braids? You saw her?”
“Well, yes. Right before I came here. Didn’t you send her?”
Fogg’s face became studiously empty.
“In a manner of speaking. She’s a special case. Works on an independent basis. Freelance, you might say.”
Quentin’s mind spun. Maybe he should ask to see a brochure. And no one had said anything about tuition yet. And gift horses and all that notwithstanding, how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.
“Don’t you want to see my SATs?”
“I have,” Fogg said patiently. “And a lot more than that. But yesterday’s Exam was all we really needed. It’s very comprehensive. Admission here is quite competitive, you know. I doubt there’s a more exclusive school of any kind on the continent. We held six Exams this summer, for twenty places. Only two Passed yesterday, you and another boy, the boy with the tattoos and the hair. Penny, he says his name is. Can’t be his real name.
“This is the only magical school in North America,” Fogg went on, leaning back behind his desk. He almost seemed to be enjoying Quentin’s discomfort. “There’s one in the UK, two on the Continent, four in Asia, and so on. One in New Zealand for some reason. People talk a lot of guff about American magic, but I assure you we are quite up to the international standard. In Zurich they still teach phrenology, if you can believe that.”
Something small but heavy fell off Fogg’s desk with a clunk. He bent to retrieve it: a silver statue of a bird that seemed to be twitching.
“Poor little thing,” he said, petting it with his large hands. “Someone tried to change it into a real bird, but it got stuck in between. It thinks it’s alive, but it’s much too heavy to fly.” The metal bird cheeped feebly, a dry clicking noise like an empty pistol. Fogg sighed and put it away in a drawer. “It’s always launching itself out of windows and landing in the hedges.
“Now.” The Dean leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “Should you choose to matriculate here, we’ll do some minor illusion work with your parents. They can’t know about Brakebills, of course, but they’ll think you’ve been accepted to a very prestigious private institute—which isn’t at all far from the truth—and they’ll be very proud. It’s painless and quite effective, as long as you don’t say anything too obvious.
“Oh, and you’ll start right away. The semester begins in two weeks, so you’ll have to skip the rest of your senior year. But I really shouldn’t be telling you all this before we’ve done your paperwork.”
Fogg took out a pen and a fat sheaf of closely handwritten paper that looked like a treaty between two eighteenth-century nation-states.
“Penny signed yesterday,” he said. “Very quick Examination, that boy. What do you say?”
So that was it, that was the sales pitch. Fogg put the papers in front of him and held out the pen. Quentin took it, a fancy-looking metal fountain pen as thick as a cigar. His hand hovered over the page. This was ridiculous. Was he really going to throw everything away? Everything: everybody he knew, James and Julia, whatever college he would have gone to, whatever career he would have had, everything he thought he’d been getting ready for. For this? This bizarre charade, this fever dream, this fancy-dress role-playing game?
He stared out the window. Fo
gg watched him impassively, just waiting for him to fall for it. If he cared one way or the other, he wasn’t letting on. The little floundering metal bird, having escaped its drawer, butted its head industriously against the wainscoting.
And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin’s chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign. Jesus, what the hell was he thinking? Of course he was going to sign. This was everything he’d always wanted, the break he’d given up on years ago. It was right in front of him. He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherfucking magician. Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?
“Okay,” Quentin said evenly. “All right. On one condition: I want to start now. I want to stay in that room. I don’t want to go home.”
They didn’t make him go home. Instead, his things arrived from home in a collection of duffel bags and rolly suitcases, packed by his parents, who had, as Fogg promised, somehow been squared with the idea that their only child was suddenly matriculating in the middle of the semester at a mysterious educational institution they had never visited or even heard of. Quentin slowly unpacked his clothes and his books and put them away in the cabinets and cubbies in the little curved tower room. He didn’t even want to touch them now. They were part of his old self, his old life, the one he was molting away. The only thing missing was the book, the notebook the paramedic gave him. That was nowhere to be found. He’d left it in the exam room on the assumption that he’d be going back there, but when he finally did it was gone. Dean Fogg and the butler pled ignorance.
Sitting there alone in his room, his folded clothes around him on the bed, he thought about James and Julia. God only knew what they were thinking. Did she miss him? Now that he was gone, would she realize she’d had the wrong man all along? He should probably get in touch with them somehow. Though really, what the hell could he say? He wondered what would have happened if James had taken the envelope from the paramedic too. Maybe he would have gotten to take the exam, too. Maybe that was part of the test.
He let himself unclench a little. Just slightly, he stopped bracing for the blow from above, and for the first time he seriously considered the idea that it might not come at all.
With nothing else to do Quentin roamed through the huge house, unsupervised and rudderless. The Dean and the teachers were nice enough when he ran into them, but they had their own work to do and their own problems to deal with. It was like being at a fancy beach resort during the off-season, rattling around in a grand hotel with no guests, just empty rooms and empty gardens and empty, echoing hallways. He ate his meals alone in his room and loitered in the library—naturally they had the complete works of Christopher Plover—and luxuriously contemplated, one by one, in order, each of the problem sets and projects and papers he would never have to finish. Once he found his way up to the clock tower and spent an afternoon watching the huge rusty iron pendulum sway back and forth, following the massive gears and levers and catchments as they turned and meshed, carrying out their mechanical syllogism, until the glow of the setting sun shone through the tremendous backward clock face.
Sometimes he burst out laughing out of nowhere, for no reason. He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he’d had much practice at. It was just too fucking funny. He was going to learn magic! He was either the greatest genius of all time or the biggest idiot. But at least he was actually curious about what was going to happen to him next. For the first time in he didn’t know how long he was actually following the action with interest. In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless—whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it. Brakebills was different. It mattered. Meaning—is that what magic was?—was everywhere here. The place was crawling with it. Out there he had been on the edge of serious depression, and worse, he had been in danger of learning to really dislike himself. He was on the verge of incurring the kind of inward damage you didn’t heal from, ever. But now he felt like Pinocchio, a wooden boy who was made real. Or maybe it was the other way around, he’d been turned from a real boy into something else? Either way the change was for the better. It wasn’t Fillory, but it would do.
He didn’t spend all his time alone. Once in a while he spotted Eliot from a distance, loping across the empty green or lolling with his long legs folded up in a window seat, staring out the window or leafing distractedly through a book. He had an air of magnificent melancholy sophistication, as if his proper place were elsewhere, somewhere infinitely more compelling even than Brakebills, and he’d been confined to his present setting by a grotesque divine oversight, which he tolerated with as much good humor as could be expected.
One day Quentin was walking the edge of the great lawn when he came across Eliot leaning against an oak tree, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback book. It was more or less the same spot where they first met. Because of the odd way Eliot’s jaw was built, the cigarette stuck out at an angle.
“Want one?” Eliot asked politely. He stopped reading and held out a blue-and-white pack of Merit Ultra Lights. They hadn’t spoken since Quentin’s first day at Brakebills.
“They’re contraband,” he went on, not visibly disappointed that Quen tin didn’t take one. “Chambers buys them for me. I once caught him in the wine cellar drinking a very good petite syrah from the Dean’s private collection. Stags’ Leap, the ninety-six. We came to an understanding. He’s really a nice fellow, I shouldn’t hold it over his head. Quite a good amateur painter, albeit in a sadly outdated realist mode. I let him paint me once—draped, thank you very much. I was holding a Frisbee. I think I was supposed to be Hyacinthus. Chambers is a pompiste at heart. Deep down I don’t think he believes Impressionism ever happened.”
Quentin had never met anybody so staggeringly and unapologetically affected. It was hard to know how to respond. He summoned up all the wisdom he’d accumulated during his entire life in Brooklyn.
“Merits are for pussies,” he said.
Eliot looked at him appraisingly.
“Very true. But they’re the only cigarette I can stand. Disgusting habit. Come on, smoke one with me.”
Quentin accepted the cigarette. He was in unfamiliar territory here. He’d handled cigarettes before—they were common props in close-up magic—but he’d never actually put one in his mouth. He made the cigarette vanish—a basic thumb palm—then snapped his fingers to bring it back.
“I said smoke it, not fondle it,” Eliot said curtly.
He muttered something under his breath, then snapped his own fingers. A lighter-size flame sprang into being over the tip of his index finger. Quentin leaned in and inhaled.
It felt like his lungs had been crumpled up and then incinerated. He coughed for five solid minutes without stopping. Eliot laughed so hard he had to sit down. Quentin’s face was slick with tears. He forced himself to take another drag and threw up into a hedge.
They spent the rest of that afternoon together. Maybe he felt guilty for giving Quentin the cigarette, or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin’s company. Maybe he just needed a straight man. He led Quentin around the campus and lectured him on the underground lore of life at Brakebills.
“The keen-eyed incoming freshman will have noticed the weather, which is uncommonly clement for November. That’s because it’s still summer here. There are some very old spells on the Brakebills grounds to keep people from spotting it from the river or walking in by accident, that kind of thing. Fine old enchantments. Classic work of their kind. But they’re getting ecce
ntric in their old age, and somewhere in the 1950s time started spinning off its axis here. Gets worse every year. Nothing to worry about, in the larger picture, but we’re a little behind the mainstream. Two months twenty-eight days, give or take a few hours.”
Quentin didn’t know whether to act as awestruck as he felt or try to produce an imitation of cool worldly ennui. He changed the subject and asked about the curriculum.
“You won’t have any choice about your schedule your first year. Henry”—Eliot only ever referred to Dean Fogg by his first name—“makes everybody do the same thing. Are you smart?”
There was no non-embarrassing answer to this.
“I guess.”
“Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.
“The work is different, too. It’s not what you think. You don’t just wave a wand and yell some made-up Latin. There’s reasons why most people can’t do it.”
“Which are what?” Quentin asked.
“The reasons why most people can’t do magic? Well.” Eliot held up a long, thin finger. “One, it’s very hard, and they’re not smart enough. Two, it’s very hard, and they’re not obsessive and miserable enough to do all the work you have to do to do it right. Three, they lack the guidance and mentorship provided by the dedicated and startlingly charismatic faculty of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. And four, they lack the tough, starchy moral fiber necessary to wield awesome magical energies calmly and responsibly.