CHAPTER 2
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Quentin had tried to go straight.
It started in the Neitherlands, the silent city of Italianate fountains and locked libraries that lies somehow behind and between everywhere else. The fountains were really doorways to other worlds, and Quentin stood leaning against the one that led to Fillory. He had just been forcibly ejected from it.
He stood there for a long time, feeling the cool roughness of the stone rim. It was reassuringly solid. The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he’d been a king in a magical land. He didn’t want it to be over; it wouldn’t really be over till he let go and walked away. He could still have it for a little longer.
But no, he couldn’t. It was done. He patted the fountain one more time and set off through the empty dream-city. He felt weightless and empty. He’d stopped being who he was, but he wasn’t sure yet who he was going to be next. His head was still full of the End of the World: the setting sun, the endless thin curving beach, the two mismatched wooden chairs, the ringing crescent moon, the sputtering comets. The last sight of Julia, diving off the edge of Fillory, straight down to the Far Side of the World, down into her future.
It was a new beginning for her, but he’d hit a dead end. No more Fillory. No further.
Though he wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t notice how much the Neitherlands had changed. Before this it had always been quiet and serene, trapped under a bell jar of stillness and silence beneath a cloudy twilight sky. But something had happened: the gods had come back to fix the flaw in the universe that was magic, and in the crisis that followed the bell jar broke, and time and weather had come flooding in. Now the air smelled like mist. Ripped, ragged clouds streamed by overhead, and patches of blue sky were mirrored in shivering pools of snowmelt. The sound of trickling water was everywhere. Reluctantly, resentfully, the Neitherlands was having its first spring.
It was a season of wreckage and ruin. All around Quentin roofless buildings lay open to the elements, the toppled bookshelves inside lying in domino rows, exposed like the ribs of rotting carcasses. Stray pages torn from the libraries of the Neitherlands floated and tumbled high in the troubled air overhead. Crossing a bridge over a canal Quentin saw that the water was almost level with the banks on either side. He wondered what would happen if it overflowed.
Probably nothing. Probably he’d get wet.
The fountain that led to Earth had changed too. The sculpture at its center was of a great brass lotus, but in the struggle over magic a swarm of dragons had used it to enter the Neitherlands, and when they came surging up through it, the flower had ripped open at the seams. Quentin thought maybe somebody would have come by and repaired it by now, but instead the fountain was repairing itself. The old flower had withered and flopped over to one side, and a new brass lotus was budding open in its place.
Quentin was studying the bud fountain, wondering if even his narrow, bony hips were narrow and bony enough to fit through it, when something brushed his shoulder. By reflex he snatched it out of the air: it was a piece of paper, a page ripped from a book. The page was dense with writing and diagrams on both sides. He was about to let it go again, to give it back to the wind, but then he didn’t. He folded it in quarters and shoved it in his back pocket instead.
Then he fell to Earth.
—
It was raining on Earth, or at least it was in Chesterton: bucketing down, hard and freezing cold, a November New England monsoon. For reasons best known to itself the magic button had chosen to place him in the lush Massachusetts suburb where his parents lived, on the wide flat lawn in front of their too-large house. Rain hammered on the roof and streamed down the windows and vomited out of a drainpipe in a rooster tail. It soaked through his clothes almost immediately—in the Neitherlands he’d still been able to smell the sea salt of Fillory on his clothes, but now the rain dissolved it and washed it away forever. Instead he smelled the smells of autumn rain in the suburbs: mulch rotting, wooden decks swelling, wet dogs, hedges breathing.
He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He’d hardly glanced at it before—he’d been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave—but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch. He thought about how Eliot had harvested it himself, from a clock-sapling in the Queenswood, and then carried it and kept it safe for him during all his months at sea. It was a great gift. He wished he’d appreciated it more at the time.
Though it had stopped ticking. Being on Earth didn’t seem to agree with it. Maybe it was the weather.
Quentin stared at his parents’ darkened house for a long time, waiting to feel an urge to go inside, but the urge never came. As dark and massive as it was the house exerted no gravitational pull on him. When he thought of his parents it was almost like they were old lovers, so distant now that he couldn’t even remember why his link to them had once seemed so real and urgent. They’d managed the neat trick of bringing up a child with whom they had absolutely nothing in common, or if there was something none of them had ever risen to the challenge of finding it.
Now they’d drifted so far apart that the silver thread connecting them had simply snapped. If he had a home anywhere, it wasn’t here.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and chanted four long, low syllables under his breath while at the same time making a big circle with his left hand. The rain began sheeting off an invisible lens over his head, and he felt, if not dryer, then at least that he had taken the first step on the long and arduous path to dryness.
Then he walked away down the wide wet suburban sidewalk. He was out of Fillory, and he wasn’t a king anymore. It was time to start living his damn life like everybody else. Better late than never. Quentin walked half an hour to the center of Chesterton, caught a bus from there to Alewife, took a subway to South Station, and got on a Greyhound bus bound for Newburgh, New York, north of Manhattan on the Hudson River, which was the closest you could get to Brakebills via public transportation.
Coming back was easier this time. Last time he’d been with Julia, and he’d been panicked and desperate. This time he was in no particular hurry, and he knew exactly what he needed: to be somewhere safe and familiar, where he had something to do, where people knew magic and knew him. What he needed was a job.
He stayed at the same motel as last time, then took a taxi to the same bend in the road and picked his way in through the damp forest from there. It had rained here too, and every twig and branch he brushed soaked him all over again with cold water. He didn’t bother with any fancy visualization spells this time. He figured they would see him, and that when they did they would know him for what he was.
He was right. Quentin spotted it a long way off through the trees: just a stray patch of sunlight on an otherwise overcast day. As he got closer it resolved itself into an oval of lighter, brighter air hanging there among the wet branches. The oval framed a woman’s disembodied head and shoulders, like a cameo in a locket. She was fortyish, with almond-shaped eyes, and though he didn’t recognize her she had the unmistakably alert air of a fellow practitioner.
“Hi,” Quentin said, when he was close enough that he didn’t have to shout. “I’m Quentin.”
“I know,” she said. “You coming in?”
“Thanks.”
She did something, made a small gesture somewhere out of view, and the portrait went full-length. She was standing in an archway of summer light and grass carved out of the gloomy autumn forest. She stood aside to let him pass.
“Thanks,” he said again. When the summer air hit him, tears of relief prickled unexpectedly at the corners of his eyes. He blinked and turned away, but the woman caught it.
“It never gets old, does it?”
“No,” he said. “It really doesn’t.”
—
Quentin went the long way around, bypassing the Maze—it would have been redrawn ten times over since the last time he knew it—and walked up to the House. The halls were quiet: it was August here, and there were no students to speak of, though if they hadn’t filled the incoming class yet they might still be holding entrance exams. Early afternoon sunlight fell undisturbed on the much-abused carpets in the common rooms. The whole building felt like it was resting and recovering after the catastrophe of the school year.
He didn’t know what to expect from Fogg: the last time they spoke they hadn’t parted on the best possible terms. But Quentin was here, and he was going to make his case. He found the dean in his office going through admissions files.
“Well!” Still groomed and goateed, the older man made a show of surprise. “Come in. I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”
Fogg smiled, though he didn’t get up. Quentin sat down, cautiously.
“I wasn’t expecting it either,” he said. “But it’s good to be here.”
“That’s always nice to hear. Last time I saw you I believe you had a hedge witch in tow. Tell me, did she get wherever it was she was going?”
She had, though by a long and circuitous route, and Quentin didn’t want to go into detail about it. Instead he inquired after the fortunes of the Brakebills welters team, and Fogg filled him in on that in all the detail he could have wanted and more. Quentin asked after the little metal bird that used to inhabit his office, and Fogg explained that someone had made it their doctoral project to turn it back into flesh and feathers. Fogg took out a cigar and offered one to Quentin; Quentin accepted it; they smoked.
It was all going more smoothly than he’d expected. He’d formed an idea of Fogg as a petty, spiteful tyrant, but now he began to wonder if the dean had changed, or if he’d gotten it wrong in the first place. Maybe Fogg wasn’t as bad as all that. Maybe he, Quentin, had always been a bit too sensitive and defensive around him. When Fogg asked Quentin how he could help him, Quentin told him.
And just like that, Fogg helped him. As luck would have it there was a vacancy in the faculty at the most junior level—a week earlier an incoming adjunct had had to be dismissed after it came out that he’d plagiarized most of his master’s thesis from Francis Bacon. Quentin could pick up his teaching load, if he liked. Really, he’d be doing Fogg a favor. If there was any Schadenfreude there, if Fogg took any pleasure from the sight of a newly chastened and humbled Quentin, the high-flying, adventure-having, mischief-managing prodigal son, coming crawling back begging for a handout, he hid it well.
“Don’t look so surprised, Quentin!” he said. “You were always one of the clever ones. Everyone saw it but you. If you hadn’t been so busy trying to convince yourself you didn’t belong here, you would have seen it too.”
Just as it had years ago Brakebills opened its doors to him, took him into itself, and offered him a place in its little secret hideaway world. From a pegboard Fogg gave him the keys to a room so small and with a ceiling so high that it was not unlike living at the bottom of an airshaft. It had a desk and a window and a bathroom and a bed, a narrow twin bed that had lost its twin. Its sheets had the unmistakable scent of Brakebills laundry, and the smell immediately sent Quentin dropping like a stone down a well of memory, back to the years he’d spent sleeping snugly wrapped up in Brakebills bedclothes, dreaming of a future very different from the one he now inhabited.
It wasn’t nostalgia exactly; Quentin didn’t miss the old days. But he did miss Fillory. It was only when he was finally alone in his room—not a king’s room, a teacher’s room, a very junior teacher’s room—with the door shut that Quentin allowed himself to really truly long for it. He yearned for it. He felt the full force of what he’d lost. He lay down and stared up at the faraway ceiling and thought of everything that was happening there without him, the journeys and adventures and feasts and all the various magical wonders, all across the length and breadth of Fillory, the rivers and oceans and trees and meadows, and he wanted to be there so badly that it felt like his desire should be enough to physically pull him out of his flat hard bed, out of this world, and into the one he belonged in. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.
They gave him a teaching schedule. They gave him a seat in the dining room, and the authority to discipline students. They also gave him something he should have gotten long ago, something he’d almost forgotten he didn’t have: a discipline.
Every magician had a natural predisposition to a certain specific kind of magic. Sometimes it was something trivial, sometimes it was genuinely useful, but everyone had one: it was a kind of sorcerous fingerprint. But they’d never been able to find Quentin’s. As part of his induction into the Brakebills faculty Quentin was required to state his discipline, at which point it occurred to him that he still didn’t know what it was.
Just as they had a dozen years ago they sent him to Professor Sunderland, a woman with whom he’d been seethingly, volcanically infatuated when he was an undergraduate. She met him in the same long sunlit lab she’d worked in back then; it was weird to think that she’d been here this whole time while he’d been off careening disastrously around the multiverse, and that they were now, for most practical purposes, peers.
If anything she was even more beautiful than she had been at twenty-five. Her face had ripened and softened. She looked more like herself, though what he’d thought of at the time as her serene, otherworldly quality now felt a bit more like a slight lack of affect—he hadn’t noticed how withdrawn and shut-down she was.
He’d felt so far below her then, he wasn’t sure she’d even remember him. But she did.
“Of course I do. You weren’t quite as invisible as you thought you were.”
Had he thought that? Probably he had.
“Does that mean my secret crush on you wasn’t as secret as I thought it was?”
She smiled, but not unkindly.
“The concealment of crushes probably isn’t your discipline,” she said. “Roll up your sleeves, above your elbows. Let me see the backs of your hands.”
He showed her. She gave them a brisk rub with fine powder and an irregular pattern of tiny cold sparks appeared on his skin, like a sparsely populated countryside seen from above by night. He thought he felt a web of icy prickles too, though that could have been his imagination.
“Mmmmm.”