Lev Grossman - The Magicians

They made an odd little tribe: Alice sitting hunched over the table; Quentin sprawled on the couch; Penny pacing in circles, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. The odious Popper books were hexed in such a way that you could practice in front of them and they would tell you if you’d screwed up or not by turning green (good) or red (bad), although annoyingly they wouldn’t tell you how you’d screwed up.

But Alice always knew how you screwed up. Of the three of them she was the prodigy, with preternaturally flexible hands and wrists and a freakish memory. When it came to languages she was omnivorous and insatiable. While her classmates were still wallowing in the shallows of Middle English, she was already plunging into Arabic and Aramaic and Old High Dutch and Old Church Slavonic. She was still painfully shy, but the late nights she spent with Quentin and Penny in the after-hours room wore away some of her reserve, to the point where she would sometimes exchange notes and pointers with the other two. Once in a while she even revealed a sense of humor, though more often than not she made her jokes in Old Church Slavonic.

They probably would have been lost on Penny anyway. He had no sense of humor at all. He practiced by himself, murmuring and watching his pale hands sign and flutter in a massive baroque gilt-framed mirror leaned up against the wall. The mirror had an old, fading, forgotten enchantment on it, so Penny’s reflection was sometimes replaced with an image of a treeless green hillside, a smooth grassy curve under an overcast sky. It was like a TV with a poorly installed cable box, picking up a stray image from far away, some other world.

Rather than take a break, Penny would just wait silently and impassively for the image to change back. Secretly the mirror made Quentin nervous, as if something horrible were about to come strolling over the top of that hill, or was buried restlessly underneath it.

“I wonder where it is,” Alice said. “In real life.”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “Maybe it’s in Fillory.”

“You could climb through. That’s always how it works in the books.”

“How great would that be? Think about it: we could go through and study for a month and come back and ace this thing.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to go to Fillory so you can get more homework done,” Alice said. “Because that would be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“A little quiet, people,” Penny said.

For a punk Penny could be an unbelievable drag.

Winter descended, a deep, bitter-cold Hudson Valley winter. The fountains froze over, and the Maze was traced in white snow, except where the topiary animals shivered and humped up and shook it off. Quentin and Alice and Penny found themselves drawing apart from their classmates, who regarded them with envy and resentment that Quentin didn’t have the time or energy to deal with. For the time being they were their own exclusive club within the already closed club of Brakebills.

Quentin was rediscovering his love of work. It wasn’t really a thirst for knowledge that kept him going, or any desire to live up to Professor Van der Weghe’s belief that he belonged in Second Year. It was mostly just the familiar, perverse satisfaction of repetitive, backbreaking labor, the same masochistic pleasure that had enabled him to master the Mills Mess pattern and the faro shuffle and the Charlier cut and to lay waste to Calculus 2 when he was still in eighth grade.

A few of the older students took pity on the three marathon crammers. They adopted them as mascots the way a class of kindergartners would adopt a family of gerbils. They egged them on and brought them snacks and sodas after hours. Even Eliot condescended to visit, bringing with him a set of illegal charms and talismans for staying awake and reading faster, though it was hard to tell whether they worked or not. They were procured, he said, from a seedy itinerant salesman who turned up at Brakebills once or twice a year in an old wood-paneled station wagon crammed with junk.

December slid by on silent runners, in a sleepless dream of constant toil. The work had lost all connection to whatever goal it was supposed to be accomplishing. Even Quentin’s sessions with Professor Sunderland lost their spark. He caught himself staring bleakly at the radiant upper slopes of her achingly full and gropable breasts when he knew he should be devoting himself to far more pressing technical issues like correct thumb position. His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

Now he floated through Professor March’s lectures from the back row, feeling lofty contempt for his classmates, who were only on Popper etude No. 27, when he had already scaled the glorious heights of No. 51 and watched it grow tiny beneath his still-climbing feet. He began to hate the the grungy misshapen room where he and Penny and Alice did their late-night cramming. He hated the bitter, burned smell of the coffee they drank, to the point where he almost felt tempted to try the low-grade speed Penny took as an alternative. He recognized the irritable, unpleasant, unhappy person he was becoming: he looked strangely like the Quentin he thought he’d left behind in Brooklyn.

Quentin didn’t do all his studying in the trapezoidal spare room. On weekends he could work wherever he wanted, at least during the daytime. Mostly he stayed in his own room, but sometimes he climbed the long spiral staircase up to the Brakebills observatory, a respectable if antiquated facility at the top of one of the towers. It contained a massive late-nineteenth-century telescope the size of a telephone pole, poking up at an angle through a tarnished copper dome. Somebody on the staff must have been deeply in love with this obsolete instrument, because it floated on an exquisitely complicated array of brass gears and joints that was kept freshly oiled and in a state of high polish.

Quentin liked to read in the observatory because it was high up and well heated and relatively unfrequented: not only was it hard to get to, the telescope was useless during the day. This was usually enough to secure him an afternoon of lofty, wintry solitude. But on one Saturday in late November he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who’d figured this out. When Quentin reached the top of the spiral staircase, the trapdoor was already open. He poked his head up into the circular, amber-lit room.

It was like he’d poked his head into another world, an alien planet that looked eerily like his own, but rearranged. The interloper was Eliot. He was kneeling like a supplicant in front of an old orange armchair with ripped upholstery that stood in the middle of the room, in the center of the circular track that the telescope ran on. Quentin always wondered who had gotten the chair up there in the first place and why they’d bothered — magic was obviously involved, since it wouldn’t have fit through the trapdoor, or even any of the tiny windows.

Eliot wasn’t alone. There was somebody sitting in the chair. The angle was bad, but he thought it was one of the Second Years, an unexceptional, smooth-cheeked kid with straight rust-colored hair. Quentin barely knew him. His name might have been Eric.

“No,” Eric said, and then again sharply: “No! Absolutely not.” He was smiling. Eliot started to stand up, but the boy held him down playfully by his shoulders. He wasn’t especially large. The authority he exercised over Eliot wasn’t physical.

“You know the rules,” he said, like he was speaking to a child.

“Please? Just this once?” Quentin had never heard Eliot speak in that pleading, wheedling infantile tone before. “Please?” It was not a tone he had ever expected to hear Eliot speak in.