They reached the edge of the great lawn and turned and looked back toward the House. One light was on, a teacher’s bedroom on a lower floor. An owl called. A hazy moon bleached the clouds white above the blocky outline of the roof. The scene was like an unshaken snow globe.
Quentin flashed on a memory from the Fillory books: the part in The World in the Walls when Martin and Fiona go wandering through the frozen woods looking for the trees the Watcherwoman has enchanted, each of which has a round ticking clock embedded in its trunk. As villains went the Watcherwoman was an odd specimen, since she rarely did anything particularly evil, or at any rate not where anybody could see her do it. She was usually glimpsed from a distance, rushing around wraith, a wisp of warm flesh and theQuentin wasg with a book in one hand and a timepiece in the other; sometimes she drove a terrifyingly elaborate ormolu clock-carriage that ticked loudly as it raced along. She always wore a veil that covered her face. Wherever she passed she planted her signature clock-trees.
Quentin caught himself listening for ticking, but there was no sound except for an occasional frozen crack from deep in the forest, its origin unguessable.
“This is where I came through the first time,” he said. “In the summer. I didn’t even know what Brakebills was. I thought I was in Fillory.”
Alice laughed: a surprising, hilarious shout. Quentin hadn’t actually meant it to be quite that funny.
“Sorry,” she said. “God, I used to love those books when I was little.”
“So where did you come through?”
“Over there.” She pointed at another, identical stretch of trees. “But I didn’t come through like you. I mean, through a portal.”
They must have had some special, extra-magical form of conveyance for Infallible Alice, he thought. It was hard not to envy her. A phantom tollbooth, or a chariot of fire, probably. Drawn by thestrals.
“When I came, I walked here? I wasn’t Invited?” She was talking in questions, with exaggerated casualness, but her voice was suddenly wobbly. “I had a brother who went here. I always wanted to come, too, but they never Invited me. After a while I was getting too old, so I ran away. I’d been waiting and waiting for an Invitation and it never came. I knew I’d already missed the first year. I’m a year older than you, you know.”
He hadn’t known. She looked younger.
“So I took a bus from Urbana to Poughkeepsie, then taxis from there, as far as I could. Did you ever notice there’s no driveway here? No roads either. The nearest one is the state highway.” This was the longest speech Quentin had ever heard Alice make. “I had them let me off on the shoulder, in the middle of nowhere. I had to walk the last five miles. I got lost. Slept in the woods.”
“You slept in the woods? Like on the ground?”
“I know, I should have brought a tent. Or something. I don’t know what I was thinking, I was just hysterical.”
“What about your brother? He couldn’t let you in?”
“He died.”
She offered this neutrally, purely informationally, but it brought Quentin up short. He had never imagined that Alice could have a sibling, let alone a dead one. Or that she led anything other than a charmed life.
“Alice,” he said, “this doesn’t make any sense. You do realize you’re the smartest person in our class?”
She shrugged off the compliment with one shoulder, staring fiercely up at the House.
“So you just walked in? What did they do?”
“They couldn’t believe it. Nobody’s supposed to be able to find the House by themselves. They thought it was just an accident, but it’s so obvious there’s old magic here, tons of it. This whole place is wild with it—if you look at it through the right spells, it lights up like a forest fire.
“They must have thought I was a homeless person. I had twAlice?”b">The Worldv with igs in my hair. I’d been crying all night. Professor Van der Weghe felt sorry for me. She gave me coffee and let me take the entrance Exam all by myself. Fogg didn’t want to let me, but she made him.”
“And you Passed.”
She shrugged again.
“I still don’t get it,” Quentin said. “Why didn’t you get Invited like the rest of us?”
She didn’t answer, just stared up angrily at the hazy moon. There were tears on her cheeks. He realized that he had just casually put into words what was probably the overwhelming question of Alice’s entire existence at Brakebills. It occurred to him, long after it should have, that he wasn’t the only person here who had problems and felt like an outsider. Alice wasn’t just the competition, someone whose only purpose in life was to succeed and by doing so subtract from his happiness. She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was.
They were standing in the shadow of an enormous fir tree, a shaggy blue-gray monster groaning with snow. It made Quentin think of Christmas, and he suddenly realized that they’d missed it. He’d forgotten they were on Brakebills time. Real Christmas, in the rest of the world, had been two months ago, and he hadn’t even noticed. His parents had said something about it on the phone, but the dime hadn’t dropped. Funny how things like that stopped mattering. He wondered what James and Julia had done for vacation. They’d talked about all of them going up to Lake Placid together. Her parents had a cabin there.