“I’ll be with you in just one minute!” she said brightly, busily repacking a set of very fine, sharp-looking silver instruments in a velvet carrying case. “So.” She snapped the case shut and latched it. “Everybody at Brakebills has an aptitude for magic, but there are individual variations—people tend to have an affinity for some specific strain.” She delivered this speech by rote, like a stewardess demonstrating in-flight safety procedures. “It’s a very personal thing. It has to do with where you were born, and where the moon was, and what the weather was like, and what kind of person you are, plus all kinds of technical stuff that’s not worth getting into. There are two hundred or so other factors which Professor March would be happy to list for you. It’s one of his specialties. In fact I think Disciplines are his Discipline.”
“What’s your Discipline?”
“It’s related to metallurgy. Any other personal questions?”
“Yes. Why do we have to go through all this testing? Can’t you just figure my Discipline out from my birthday and all that stuff you just mentioned?”
“You could. In theory. In practice it would just be a pain in the ass.” She smiled and put her blond hair up and secured it with a clip, and a sharp shard of his old yen for her pierced Quentin’s heart. “It’s much easier to go at it inductively, from the outside in, till we get a hit.”
She placed a bronze scarab in each of his hands and asked him to recite the alphabet, first in Greek, then in Hebrew, which he had to be prompted on, while she studied him through what looked like a many-crooked collapsible telescope. He could feel the metal beetles crackling and buzzing with old spells. He had a horrible fear that their little legs would suddenly start wriggling. Occasionally she would stop and have him repeat a letter again while she adjusted the instrument by means of protruding screws.
“Mm,” she said. “Uh-huh.”
She produced a tiny bonsai fir tree and made him stare at it from different angles while it ruffled its tiny needles in response to a wind that wasn’t there. Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately.
“Well, you’re not a herbalist!” she said.
Over the next hour she tested him in two dozen different ways, only a few of which he understood the point of. He ran through basic First Year spells while she watched and measured their effectiveness with a battery of instruments. She had him read an incantation while standing next to a large brass clock with seven hands, one of which circled its face backward a that at first Quentin didnan delognd with disconcerting speed. She sighed heavily. Several times she took down sagging, overweight volumes from high shelves and consulted them for long, uncomfortable intervals.
“You’re an interesting case,” she said.
There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.
He sorted pearl buttons of various sizes and colors into different piles while she studied his reflection in a silver mirror. She tried to get him to take a nap so she could pry into his dreams, but he couldn’t fall asleep, so she put him under with one sip of a minty, effervescent potion.
Apparently his dreams didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She stared at him for a long minute with her hands on her hips.
“Let’s try an experiment,” she said finally, with forced liveliness. She smiled thinly and tucked a stray strand of hair back behind her ear.
Professor Sunderland walked down the length of the room closing the dusty wooden shutters with a clatter until it was dark. Then she cleared the clutter off a gray slate tabletop and boosted herself up onto it. She yanked her skirt down over her knees and motioned for him to sit facing her on the table opposite.
“Go like this,” she said, holding up her hands as if she were about to conduct an invisible orchestra. Unladylike half-moons of sweat bloomed under the arms of her blouse. He went like this.
She led him through a series of gestures familiar to him from Popper, though he’d never seen them put together in quite that combination. She whispered some words he didn’t catch.
“Now go like this.” She flung her hands up over her head.
When she did it, nothing happened. But when Quentin mirrored her, fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing—it was like they’d been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.
The relief was almost unbearable. He did it again and a few more sparks flew out, weaker this time. He watched them trail down around him. The third time he got only one.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” Professor Sunderland said. “I’ll put you down as Undetermined. We’ll try again next year.”
“Next year?” Quentin watched with a rising sense of disappointment as she jumped down off the table and started reopening shutters, window by window. He winced at the sunlight flooding in. “What do you mean? What am I going to do till then?”
“Wait,” she said. “It happens. People put too much importance on these things. Be a darling and send in the next student, would you? We’re already running late, and it’s only noon.”
The summer dragged by in slow motion. It was really the fall, of course, in the world outside Brakebills, and the Brooklyn Quentin came home to for summer vacation was chilly and gray, the streets plastered with wet brown leaves and mashed ginkgo balls that smelled like vomit.
He haunted his old house like a ghost—it took a special effort to make himself visible to his parents, who always looked vaguely every once in a while. b transformv with surprised when their phantom son requested their attention. James and Julia were away at college, so Quentin took long walks. He visited the branching, angular Gowanus canal, its water the green of pooled radiator fluid. He shot baskets on deserted courts with missing nets and rainwater puddles in the corners. The autumn cold gave the ball a dead, inert feel. His world wasn’t here; it was elsewhere. He traded desultory e-mails with friends from Brakebills—Alice, Eliot, Surendra, Gretchen—and flipped indifferently through his summer reading, an eighteenth-century History of Magic that appeared quite slim from the outside but turned out to contain, by some subtle bibliographical magic, no fewer than 1,832 pages.
In November he received a cream-colored envelope, which turned up tucked by invisible hands into History of Magic. It contained a stiff letter-pressed card with an elegant engraving of the Brakebills crest, inviting him to return to school at six in the evening by way of a narrow, never-used alleyway next to the First Lutheran Church ten blocks from his house.
He dutifully presented himself at the correct address at the appointed time. This late in the fall the sun set at four thirty in the afternoon, but it was unseasonably mild out, almost warm. Standing there at the entrance to the passageway, looking around for stray vergers who might charge him with trespassing—or worse, offer him spiritual guidance—cars whooshing by in the street behind him, he had never felt so absolutely sure that he was delusional, that Brooklyn was the only reality there was, and that everything which had happened to him last year was just a fanboy hallucination, proof that the boredom of the real world had finally driven him totally and irreversibly out of his mind. The alley was so skinny he practically had to turn sideways to walk down it, his two overstuffed Brakebills duffel bags—they were midnight blue with dark brown trim, school colors—scraping against the sweating stone walls on either side. He was overwhelmingly certain that in thirty seconds he would be standing at the blank wall at the end of the alley.
But then an impossible breath of warm, sweet, late-summer air came wafting toward him from the far end of the alleyway, accompanied by the chirping of crickets, and he could see the green expanse of the Sea. As heavy as his bags were he ran toward it.
Now it was the first day of the semester, and Quentin and Alice were stranded in a baking-hot meadow outside a precious white Victorian bungalow. The bungalow was where the students who did Physical Magic met on Tuesday afternoons for their weekly seminar.