The Magicians (29 page)

Her words floated up and drifted away like cigarette smoke in the warm summer air. It was hot out in the middle of the Sea, with no shade, but they were all too lazy to move.

“She came to Brakebills about eight years ago. I think she was from Connecticut, but not fancy Connecticut, with the money and the Kennedy cousins and the Lyme disease. I think she was from New Haven, or Bridgeport. She was quiet, sort of mousy-looking—”

“How do you know she was mousy-looking?” Josh asked.

“Sh!”
Alice whacked Josh on the arm. “Don’t antagonize her. I want to hear the story.” They were all lying on a stripy blanket spread out over the ruins of Josh’s sand pattern.

“I know because Emma’s cousin told me. Anyway, it’s my story, and if I say she was mousy, then she had a tail and she lived on Swiss fucking cheese.

“Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I’m being mean. But you know, they’re just sort of at the edge of everything.

“She was a good student. She kept busy and got by in her boring little way until her Third Year, when she finally distinguished herself by falling in love with one of her professors.

“Everybody does it, of course. Or at least the girls do, since we all have daddy complexes. But usually it’s just a crush, and we get over it and move on to some loser guy our own age. But not our Emily. She was deeply, passionately, delusionally in love.
Wuthering Heights
love. She stood outside his window at night. She drew little pictures of him in class. She looked at the moon and cried. She drew little pictures of the moon in class and cried at them.

“She become moody and depressed. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus in the original whatever. Her eyes became interestingly pouchy and sunken. She started hanging out at Woof.”

All groaned. Woof was a fountain in the Maze; its official name was Van Pelt, after an eighteenth-century Dean, but it depicted Romulus and Remus suckling from a she-wolf with many dangling wolf-boobs, hence Woof. It was the chosen hangout of the goths and the artsy crowd.

“Now she had a Secret, capital
S
, and ironically it made her more attractive to people, because they wanted to know what her Secret was. And sure enough, before long a boy, some deeply unfortunate boy, fell in love with her.

“She didn’t love this boy back, since she was savin’ all her lovin’ for Professor Sexyman, but he made her feel pretty damn good, since nobody had ever been in love with her before. She strung him along and flirted with him in public in the hope that it would make her real love interest jealous.

“Now we turn to the third point in our little triangle of love. By all rights the professor should have been completely impervious to our Emily’s charms. He should have had an avuncular little chuckle over it in the Senior Common Room and then forgotten about it. She wasn’t even that hot. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis, maybe he thought a liaison with Ms. Greenstreet could restore to him some of his long-vanished youth. Who knows. He was married, too, the idiot.

“We’ll never know exactly what happened or how far it went, except that it went too far, and then Professor Sexyman came to his senses, or got what he wanted, and he called it off.

“Needless to say our Emily became even gothier and weepier and more like a Gorey drawing than she already was, and her boy became even more besotted and brought her presents and flowers and was Supportive.

“Maybe you knew this, I don’t know, I didn’t, but Woof used to be different from the other fountains. That’s why the doomers started hanging out there in the first place. You wouldn’t notice what was off about it, at first, but after a while you’d realize that when you looked into it, you wouldn’t see your own reflection, just empty sky. And maybe if the sky was cloudy on that particular day, the sky in the fountain would be blue, or the other way around. It definitely wasn’t a normal reflection. And every once in a while you’d look into it and you’d see other faces looking up at you, looking puzzled, as if they were looking into some other fountain somewhere else and were weirded out because they were seeing your face and not their own. Somebody must have figured out a way to switch the reflections in two fountains, but who did it and why, and how, and why the Dean didn’t change them back, I have no idea.

“You have to wonder, too, if it was more than just the reflections—if you could dive down into one pool and come up in the other one, in this world or some other world. There’s always been something off about those fountains. Did you know they were here before Brakebills? They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around. Or that’s what people say.”

Eliot snorted.

“Well that’s what people
say,
darling.
Anyway,
” Janet went on, “the thing is, Emily started spending a lot of time at Woof, just smoking and hanging out, and I guess mooning over her little affair. She spent so much time there that she started to recognize one of the faces in the fountain. Somebody like her, who was spending a lot of time at the other fountain, the one in the reflection. Let’s call her Doris. After a while Emily and Doris got to noticing each other. They’d acknowledge each other, a little wave, you know, just to be polite. Probably Doris was a little mopey, too. They got to feeling like kindred spirits.

“Emily and Doris worked out a way to communicate. Again, the exact details have eluded your intrepid correspondent. Maybe they held up signs or something. They must have had to be in mirror writing, to make sense as reflections, or am I getting that wrong?

“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived, maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily, maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris, maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it?”

A chill settled over the group, where they lay on the sun-warm turf. Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable. When Quentin had first gotten to Brakebills, he’d wondered why everybody didn’t just make themselves ridiculously good-looking. He’d looked at the kids with an obviously flawed feature—like Gretchen with her leg, or Eliot with his twisted jaw—and wondered why they didn’t get somebody to fix them up, like Hermione with her teeth in
Harry Potter
. But in reality it always ended in disaster.

“Poor Emily,” Janet said. “When she took down the spell that Doris taught her through the fountain, she actually thought she’d found it, the secret technique everybody else had missed. It was elaborate and costly, but it really looked like it might work. After a few weeks of laying the groundwork, she put it together one night by herself in her room.

“How do you think she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw what she’d done to herself?” You could almost hear a note of genuine sympathy in Janet’s hard voice. “I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”

It was late enough in the afternoon now that the shadows from the forest had almost stretched out from the western edge of the Sea far enough to lap at the edge of their blanket.

“Must have been she could still talk, because she got word to her boy that she was in trouble, and he came to her room, and after much preliminary whispering through the keyhole she let him in. And we have to give our boy credit. It must have been bad, very bad, but he stuck by her. She wouldn’t let him go to the faculty—Dunleavy was still Dean, and she would have kicked Emily out without thinking about it.

“So he told her to stay there, don’t move, don’t do anything to make it worse, he would go to the library and see what he could find.

“He came back just before dawn, thinking he had it pretty much worked out. You can imagine the scene. They’d both been up all night. They’re sitting cross-legged on her little bed, her with her scrambled head, him with about eight books open around him on the covers. He’s mixed up a few reagents in cereal bowls from the dining hall. She’s leaning what’s left of her forehead against the wall, trying to keep cool. The blue in the window is getting brighter and brighter, they’ve got to take care of this soon. She’d probably gone past panic and regret at this point. But not past hope.

“But then think about his state of mind. In a way, for him, it was the perfect thing to have happen. This is his golden moment, his chance to be the hero, to save her and win her love, or at least some pity sex. It’s his chance to be strong for her, which is the only thing he’s ever wanted to do.

“But I don’t know, I think he’d had enough time at this point, maybe he’d figured out what was really going on. I’m guessing the dime had finally dropped. She’d taken a terrible chance, and he had to know she hadn’t done it for him.

“Either way he was in no shape to be doing major wizardry. He was tired and scared and in over his head, and I think his heart must have been broken a little, too. Maybe he just wanted it too badly. He launched into the repair spell, which I happen to know which one it was, it was from the Major Arcana, Renaissance stuff. Big energies. It got away from him in the worst possible way. It took him over, took his body away. Right in front of her eyes, he burned up screaming. Blue fire. He became a
niffin
.”

That’s what Fogg was talking about that night in the infirmary, Quentin thought. About losing control. Apparently the others knew what the word meant,
niffin
. They stared at Janet like they’d been turned to stone.

“Well. Emily freaked out, I mean
freaked
out. Barricaded the door, wouldn’t let anybody in until her beloved professor himself showed up. By that point the whole school was awake. I can only imagine how he felt, since in a way the whole thing was his fault. He can’t have been too proud of himself. I suppose he would have had to try to banish the
niffin
if it didn’t want to leave. I don’t know if even he could have. I don’t think those things really have an upper limit.

“Anyway, he kept his head, kept everybody else out of the room. He put her face back, right there on the spot, which cannot have been easy. Whatever else he was he must have been some magician, because that spell that came through the fountain, that was a nasty piece of work. And she probably twisted it up even more in the casting, too. But he parsed it on the fly and made her reasonably presentable, though I hear she’s never been quite the way she was. Not like she’s deformed or anything, just different. Probably if you hadn’t met her you would never know.

“And that’s pretty much it. I can’t even imagine what they told the boy’s parents. I hear he was from a magical family, so they probably got some version of the truth. But, you know, the clean version.”

There was a long silence. A bell was clanging far away, a boat on the river. The shadow from the trees had flooded all the way over them, deliciously cool in the late-summer afternoon.

Alice cleared her throat. “What happened to the professor?”

“You haven’t figured it out?” Janet didn’t bother to conceal her glee. “They gave him a choice: resign in disgrace . . . or transfer to Antarctica. Brakebills South. Guess which one he took.”

“Oh my God,” Josh said. “It was Mayakovsky.”

“That explains a hell of a lot,” Quentin said.

“Doesn’t it though? Doesn’t it just?”

“So what happened to Emily Greenstreet?” Alice asked. “She just left school?” There was a trace of ground steel in her voice. Quentin wasn’t totally sure where it was coming from. “What happened to her? Did they send her to a normal school?”

“I hear she does something businessy in Manhattan,” Janet said. “They set her up with an easy corporate job, I don’t know, management consulting or something. We own part of some big firm. Lots of magic to cover up the fact that she doesn’t do anything. She just sits in an office and surfs the Web all day. I think part of her just didn’t survive what happened, you know?”

After that even Janet stopped talking. Quentin let himself drift among the clouds. He felt spinny from the wine, like the Earth had come untightened and was wobbling loose on its gimbaled base. Apparently he wasn’t the only one, because when Josh stood up after a few minutes he immediately lost his balance and fell over again on the turf. There was scattered applause.

But then he stood up again, steadied himself, did a slow, deep knee bend, and executed a perfect standing backflip. He stuck the landing and straightened up, beaming.

“It worked,” he said. “I can’t believe it. I take back everything bad I ever said about Viking shamans! It fucking worked!”

The spell had worked, though for some reason Josh was the only one who got anything out of it. As they picked up the picnic things and shook the sand out of the blanket, Josh did laps around the field, whooping and making huge superhero leaps in the fading light.

“I am a Viking warrior! Cower before my might! Cower! The strength of Thor and all his mighty hosts flows through me! And I fucked your mother! I . . . fucked . . . your . . . motherrrrrrrrrr!”

“He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”

Eventually Josh disappeared in search of other people to show off to, loudly singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Janet and Eliot straggled off in the direction of the Cottage, Alice and Quentin toward the House, sunburnt and sleepy and still half drunk. Quentin had already made up his mind to nap through dinner.