Professor Van der Weghe moved down the line again. With both hands she picked up each student in turn and threw him or her bodily off the roof. They all, in spite of the shock or because of it, reflexively spread out their wings and caught the air before they could be snared by the bare, grasping treetops below. One by one they sailed away into the night.
When it was his turn, Quentin honked in protest. Professor Van der Weghe’s human hands were hard and scary and burned against his feathers. He shat on her feet in panic. But then he was in the air and tumbling. He spread his wings and beat his way up into the sky, thrashing and punishing the air till it bore him up. It would have been impossible not to.
Quentin’s new goose-brain, it emerged, was not much given to reflection. His senses now tracked only a handful of key stimuli, but it tracked those very, very closely. This body was made for either sitting or flying, not much else, and as it happened Quentin was in a mood to fly. In fact, he felt like flying more than he had ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.
With no conscious thought or apparent effort, he and his classmates fell into the classic ragged V formation, with a Fourth Year named Georgia at the apex. Georgia was the daughter of the receptionist at a car dealership in Michigan, and she had come here against her family’s will—unlike Quentin, she had confessed fully the nature of Brakebills, and as a reward for her honesty Georgia’s parents had tried to have her committed. Thanks to Fogg’s subtle spellcraft Georgia’s parents believed her to be attending a vocational institute for troubled adults. Now Georgia, whose Discipline was an obscure branch of Healing roughly analogous to endocrinology, and who wore her wiry black hair cinched at the back with a tortoiseshell barrette, was leading them southward, her brand-new wings pumping vigorously.
It was just chance; any one of them could have led the flock. Quentin was vaguely aware that, although he’d lost the lion’s share of his cognitive capacity in the transformation, he’d also picked up a couple of new senses. One had to do with air: he could perceive wind speed and direction and air temperature as clearly as whorls of smoke in a windwood-paneled b gave himv with tunnel. The sky now appeared to him as a three-dimensional map of currents and eddies, friendly rising heat plumes and dense dangerous sinks of cool air. He could feel the prickle of distant cumulus clouds swapping bursts of positive and negative electrical charge. Quentin’s sense of direction had sharpened, too, to the point where it felt like he had a finely engineered compass floating in oil, perfectly balanced, at the center of his brain.
He could feel invisible tracks and rails extending away from him through the air in all directions into the blue distance. They were the Earth’s lines of magnetic force, and it was along one of these rails that Georgia was leading them. She was taking them south. By dawn they were a mile up and doing sixty miles an hour, overtaking cars on the Hudson Parkway below them.
They passed New York City, a stony encrustation crackling with alien heat and electrical sparks and exuding toxic flatulence. They flew all day, following the coastline, past Trenton and Philadelphia, sometimes over sea, sometimes over frozen fields, surfing the temperature gradients, boosted by updrafts, transferring seamlessly from current to current as one petered out and the next one kicked in. It felt fantastic. Quentin couldn’t imagine stopping. He couldn’t believe how strong he was, how many wing beats he had stored up in his iron chest muscles. He just couldn’t contain himself. He had to talk about it.
“Honk!” he yelled. “Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk!”
His classmates agreed.
Quentin was shuffled up and down the V in an orderly fashion, in more or less the same way a volleyball team rotates serve. Sometimes they plonked down and rested and fed in a reservoir or a highway median or a badly drained spot on the lawn of a suburban office park (landscaping errors were pure gold to geese). Not infrequently they shared these priceless scraps of real estate with other Vs, real geese who, sensing their transformed nature, regarded them with polite amusement.
How long they flew, Quentin couldn’t have said. Once in a while he caught sight of a land formation he recognized, and he tried to calculate time and distance—if they flew at such and such a speed, and the Chesapeake Bay was so many miles south of New York City, then X number of days must have passed since … what again exactly? The Xs and blanks and other equationly such-and-suches stubbornly refused to fill themselves in. They didn’t want to do their dance. Quentin’s goose-brain didn’t have the hardware to handle numbers, nor was it interested in whatever point those numbers were supposed to prove anyway.
They had gone far enough south now that the weather was perceptibly warmer, and then they went farther still. They went south over the Florida Keys, dry, crusty little nubbins barely poking their heads up out of the ceaselessly lapping turquoise, then out over the Caribbean, bypassing Cuba, farther south than any sensible goose had license to go. They overflew the Panama Canal, no doubt causing any bird-watchers who happened to spot them to shake their heads at the lost little V as they dutifully logged it in their bird journals.
Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew, or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. He forgot about his human past, about Brakebills and Brooklyn and James and Julia and Penny and Dean Fogg. Why hang on to them? He had no name anymore. He barely had any individual identity, and he didn’t want one. What good were such human artifacts? He was an animal. His job was to turn bugs and plants into muscle and fat and feathers and Alice?”b gave himv with flight and miles logged. He served only his flock-fellows and the wind and the laws of Darwin. And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier.
Though it was tougher going now. They splashed down more rarely and in more exotic locales, widely spaced way stations that must have been picked out for them in advance. He’d be cruising along a mile and a half up, one eye monitoring the rocky ruff of the Andes, feeling his empty belly and the ache in his chest muscles, when something would twinkle in the forest a hundred miles down the line, and sure enough they’d happen upon a freshly flooded soccer field, or an abandoned swimming pool in some Shining Path warlord’s ruined villa, rainwater having diluted almost to nothing the lingering chemical tang of chlorine.
It was getting colder again, after their long tropical interlude. Peru gave way to Chile and the grassy, wind-ruffled Patagonian pampas. They were a lean flock now, their fat reserves depleted, but nobody turned aside or hesitated for a second as they plunged suicidally south from the tip of Cape Horn out over the terrifying blue chaos of the Drake Passage. The invisible highway they rode would brook no swerving.
There was no playful intra-flock honking now. Quentin glanced over once at the other branch of the V to see Janet’s black button eye burning with furious determination opposite him. They overnighted on a miraculous barge adrift in deep water and loaded with good things, watercress and alfalfa and clover. When the bleak gray shore of Antarctica heaved up over the horizon, they regarded it not with relief but with collective resignation. This was no respite. There were no goose names for this country because geese didn’t come here, or if they did they never came back. He could see magnetic tracks and rails converging in the air here, carving in from far away on either side, like the longitude lines that come crowding together at the bottom of a globe. The Brakebills V flew high, the wrinkled gray swells telescopically clear below them through two miles of dry, salted air.
Instead of a beach a fringe of tumbled boulders crammed with bizarre, unintelligible penguins crept by, then blank white ice, the frozen skull of the Earth. Quentin was tired. The cold tore at his little body through its thin feathery jacket. He no longer knew what was keeping them aloft. If one of them dropped, he knew, they would all give up, just fold their wings and dive for the porcelain-white snow, which would happily devour them.
And then the rail they followed dipped like a dowser’s rod. It angled them downward, and they slipped and slid gratefully down it, accepting a loss in altitude in exchange for speed and blessed relief from the effort of maintaining height with their burning wings. Quentin could see now that there was a stone house there in the snow, an anomaly in the otherwise featureless plain. It was a place of men, and ordinarily Quentin would have feared it, crapped on it, and then blown by it and forgotten it.
But no, there was no question, their track ended there. It buried itself in one of the stone house’s many snowy roofs. They were close enough now that Quentin could see a man standing on one of them, waiting for them, holding a long straight staff. The urge to fly from him was strong, but exhaustion and above all the magnetic logic of the track were stronger.
At the very last second he cupped his stiffened wings and they caught the air like a sail, snatching up the last of his kinetic energy and breaking his fall. HeAlice?”b gave himv with plopped onto the snow roof and lay there gasping at the thin atmosphere. His eyes went dull. The human hadn’t moved. Well, fuck him. He could do what he wanted with them, pluck them and gut them and stuff them and roast them, Quentin didn’t care anymore as long as he could just have one blessed moment of rest for his aching wings.
The man shaped a strange syllable with his fleshy, beakless lips and tapped the base of his staff on the roof. Fifteen pale, naked human teenagers lay in the snow under the white polar sun.
Quentin woke up in a bare white bedroom. He could not have guessed to the nearest twenty-four hours how long he’d been asleep. His chest and arms felt bruised and achy. He looked at his crude, pink, human hands, with their stubby featherless fingers. He brought them up to touch his face. He sighed and resigned himself to being a man again.
There was very little in the bedroom, and all of it was white: the bedclothes, the whitewashed walls, the coarse drawstring pajamas he wore, the white-painted iron bedstead, the slippers waiting for him on the cold stone floor. From the small square window Quentin could see he was on the second floor. His view was of broken snowfields beneath a white sky, stretching out to the horizon, a meaningless abstract white line an unjudgeable distance away. My God. What had he gotten himself into?
Quentin shuffled out into the corridor, still in his pajamas and a thin robe he’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the door. He found his way downstairs into a quiet, airy hall with a timbered ceiling; it was identical to the dining hall at Brakebills, but the vibe was different, more like an Alpine ski lodge. A long table with benches ran most of the length of the hall.
Quentin sat down. A man sat alone at one end of the table, nursing a mug of coffee and staring bleakly at the picked-over remains of a lavish breakfast. He was sandy-haired, tall but round-shouldered, with a weak chin and the beginnings of a paunch. His dressing gown was much whiter and fluffier than Quentin’s. His eyes were a pale, watery green.
“I let you sleep,” he said. “Most of the others are already up.”
“Thanks.” Quentin scooched down the bench to sit across from him. He rummaged through the leftover plates and dishes for a clean fork.
“You are at Brakebills South.” The man’s voice was oddly flat, with a slight Russian accent, and he didn’t look directly at Quentin when he talked. “We are about five hundred miles from the South Pole. You flew in over the Bellingshausen Sea on your way in from Chile, over a region called Ellsworth Land. They call this part of Antarctica Marie Byrd Land. Admiral Byrd named it after his wife.”
He scratched his tousled hair unselfconsciously.
“Where’s everybody else?” Quentin asked. There didn’t seem to be any point in being formal, since they were both wearing bathrobes. And the cold hash browns were unbelievably good. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.
“I gave them the morning.” He waved in no particular direction. “Classes begin in the afternoon.”
Quentin nodded, his mouth full.
“What kind of classes?” he managed.
“What kind of classes,” the man repeated. “Here at Brakebills South you will begin your education in magic. Or I suppose you thought that was what you were doing with Professor Fogg?”
Questions like that always confused Quentin, so he resorted to honesty.
“Yes, I did think that.”
“You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think”—his accent made it theenk—“that you have been studying magic.” Medzhik. “You have practiced your Popper and memorized your conjugations and declensions and modifications. What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?”
It popped out automatically. “Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water.”
“Very good,” he said sarcastically. “Magnificent. You are a genius.”
With an effort Quentin decided not to be stung by this. He was still enjoying the Zen afterglow of having been a goose. And the hash browns.
“Thank you.”