Lev Grossman - The Magicians

He got it then. She had been at the Exam after all, he hadn’t been mistaken, but she hadn’t made the cut. They’d culled her in the first round, during the written test.

But this was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen, there were safeguards against it. Anybody who flunked the Exam was supposed to have their memory gently, lovingly clouded by a faculty member and then overwritten with a plausible alibi. It wasn’t simple, nor was it outrageously ethical, but the spells were humane and well understood. Except in her case they hadn’t worked, or not completely.

“Julia,” he said. Their faces were very close together. There was nicotine on her breath. “Julia, what are you doing here?”

“Don’t pretend with me, don’t you dare pretend! You go to that school, don’t you? The magic school?”

Quentin kept his face blank. It was a basic rule at Brakebills not to discuss the school with outsiders. He could get expelled. But whatever, if Fogg screwed up the memory spells it wasn’t Quentin’s problem. And this was Julia. Her lovely freckly face, so close to his, looked much older. Her skin was blotchy. She was in agony.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. Sure. I go there.”

“I knew it!” she shrieked. She stamped her booted foot on the graveyard grass. From her reaction he guessed that she’d been at least halfway bluffing. “I knew it was real, I knew it was real,” she said, mostly to herself. “I knew it wasn’t a dream!” She bent over, with her hands over her face, and one convulsive sob escaped her.

Quentin took a deep breath. He readjusted his jacket.

“Listen,” he said gently. She was still doubled over. He bent down, putting a hand on her narrow back. “Julia. You’re not supposed to remember any of that stuff. They’re supposed to make you forget if you don’t get in.”

“But I should have!” She straightened up with the flashing red eyes and cold crystal seriousness of the true nutjob. “I was supposed to get in. I know I was. It was a mistake. Believe me, it was.” Her large eyes tried to burn into his. “I’m like you, I can do real magic. I’m like you. See? That’s why they couldn’t make me forget.”

Quentin saw. He could see everything. No wonder she’d been so altered the last time he saw her. That one glimpse through the curtain, of the world behind the world, had knocked her completely out of orbit. She’d seen it once, and she couldn’t let go. Brakebills had ruined her.

There was a time when he would have done anything for her. And he still would, he just didn’t know what to do. Why did he feel so guilty? He took a deep breath.

“But that’s not how it works. Even if you really can do magic, that wouldn’t make you any more resistant to memory spells than anybody else.”

She was staring at him hungrily. Everything he was saying just confirmed what she wanted to believe: that magic was real. He backed away, just to put some distance between them, but she grabbed his sleeve.

“Oh, no-no-no-no-no,” she said with a brittle smile. “Q. Please. Wait. No. You’re going to help me. That’s why I came here.”

She had dyed her hair black. It looked dry and burnt.

“Julia, I want to. I just don’t know what I can do.”

“Just watch this. Watch.”

She let go of his arm, reluctantly, as if she expected him to vanish or run away the instant she did. Incredibly, Julia launched into a basically correct version of a simple Basque optical spell called Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray.

She must have found it online. Some genuine magical information did circulate in the straight world, mostly on the Internet, though it was buried in so much bogus crap that nobody could tease out the real stuff, even if they could have used it. Quentin had even seen a Brakebills blazer for sale on eBay. It was extremely rare, but not unheard of, for civilians to work up a spell or two on their own, but as far as Quentin knew they never got into anything serious. Real magicians called them hedge witches. A few of them had careers as stage magicians, or set themselves up as cult demi-deities, gathering around themselves congregations of Wiccans and Satanists and oddball Christian outliers.

Julia proclaimed the words of the spell theatrically, overarticulating like she was doing summer-stock Shakespeare. She had no idea what she was doing. Quentin glanced nervously at the doorway at the back of the church.

“Look!” She held up her hand defiantly. The spell had actually worked, sort of. Her bitten-down fingertips left faint radiant rainbow trails in the air. She waved them around, making mystical gestures like an interpretive dancer. Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray was a totally useless spell. Quentin felt a pang when he thought about how many months, if not years, it must have cost her to figure it out.

“See?” she demanded, close to tears. “You see it too, right? It’s not too late for me. I won’t go back to college. Tell them. Tell them I could still come.”

“Does James know?”

She shook her head tightly. “He wouldn’t understand. I don’t see him anymore.”

He wanted to help her, but there was no way to. It was far, far too late. Better to be blunt about it. This could have been me, he thought. This was almost me.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” he said. “It’s not up to me. I’ve never heard of them changing their minds — no one ever gets a second Exam.”

But Alice got an Exam, he thought, even though she wasn’t Invited.

“You could tell them, though. You can’t decide, but you can tell them I’m here, right? That I’m still out here? You can at least do that!”

She grabbed his arm again, and he had to mutter a quick counterspell to snuff out the Prismatic Spray. That stuff could eat into fabric.

“Just tell them you saw me,” she said urgently, her eyes full of dying hope. “Please. I’ve been practicing. You can teach me. I’ll be your apprentice. I’ll do whatever you need. I have an aunt who lives in Winchester, I can live with her.

“Or what do you need, Quentin?” She moved closer to him, just slightly, so that her knee touched his knee. In spite of himself he felt the old electrical field form between them. She hazarded a curvy, sardonic smile, letting the moment hang in the air. “Maybe we can help each other. You used to want my help.”

He was angry at himself for being tempted. He was angry at the world for being this way. He wanted to yell obscenities. It would have been terrible to see anybody scrape the bottom like this, but her… it should have been anybody but her. She has already seen more unhappiness, Quentin thought, than I will ever see in my life.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Julia. If I tell them, they’re just going to find you and wipe your memory. For real this time.”

“They can try,” she snarled, suddenly fierce. “They tried once already.”

She breathed hard through pinched white nostrils.

“Just tell me where it is. Where we were. I’ve been looking for it. Just tell me where the school is, and I’ll leave you alone.”

Quentin could only imagine the kind of shit he’d be in if Julia showed up at the House hell-bent on matriculating and dropped his name.

“It’s in upstate New York. On the Hudson somewhere, I don’t know exactly where. I really don’t. It’s near West Point. They make it invisible. Even I don’t know how to find it. But I’ll tell them about you, if that’s truly what you want.”

He was just making it worse. Maybe he should have bluffed her after all, he thought. Tried harder to lie. Too late.

She put her arms around him, as if she were too exhausted by relief and despair to stand anymore, and he held her. There was a time when this was everything he wanted.