Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“They couldn’t make me forget,” she whispered into his chest. “Do you understand that? They couldn’t make me forget.”

He could feel her heart beating, and the word he heard when it beat was shame, shame, shame. He wondered why they hadn’t taken her. If anybody should have gone to Brakebills, it was her, not him. But they really would wipe her memory, he thought. Fogg would make sure this time. She’d be happier that way anyway. She could get back on track, go back to college, get back together with James, get on with her life. It would all be for the best.

By next morning he was back at Brakebills. The others were already there; they were surprised he’d lasted as long as he did. The most any of them had spent at home was forty-eight hours. Eliot hadn’t gone home at all.

It was cool and quiet in the Cottage. Quentin felt safe again. He was back where he belonged. Eliot was in the kitchen with a dozen eggs and a bottle of brandy, trying to make flips, which nobody wanted but which he was determined to make anyway. Josh and Janet were playing an idiotic card game called Push — it was basically the magical equivalent of War — that was wildly popular at Brakebills. Quentin just used it as a chance to show off his card-handling skills, which was why nobody ever wanted to play with him anymore.

While they played Janet told the story of Alice’s Antarctic ordeal, despite the fact that everybody except Quentin had heard it already, and Alice herself was right there in the room, silently paging through an old herbal in the window seat. Quentin didn’t know how he would feel about seeing Alice again, after he’d made such a comprehensive mess of their last conversation, but to his amazed relief, and despite every possible reason to the contrary, it wasn’t awkward at all. It was perfect. His heart clenched with silent happiness when he saw her.

“And then when Mayakovsky tried to give her the bag of sheep fat, she threw it back in his face!”

“I meant to hand it back to him,” Alice said quietly from the window seat. “But it was so cold and I was shaking so badly, I sort of flung it at him. He was all ‘chyort vozmi!’ ”

“Why didn’t you just take it?”

“I don’t know.” She put the book down. “I’d made all these plans for getting by without it, it just threw me off. Plus I wanted him to stop looking at me naked. And anyway I didn’t know he was going to have mutton fat for us. I hadn’t even prepared the Chkhartishvili.”

That was a white lie. Like Alice couldn’t have cast Chkhartishvili cold. He had missed her so much.

“So what did you do for heat?” he said.

“I tried using some of those German thermogenesis charms, but they kept fading away whenever I fell asleep. By the second night I was waking myself up every fifteen minutes just to make sure I was still alive. By the third day I was losing my mind. So I ended up using a tweaked Miller Flare.”

“I don’t get it.” Josh frowned. “How is that supposed to help?”

“If you kind of mangle it a little it becomes inefficient. The extra energy comes out as heat instead of light.”

“You know you could have cooked yourself by accident?” Janet said.

“I know. But when I realized the German thing wasn’t going to work, I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“I think I saw you once,” Quentin said quietly. “At night.”

“You couldn’t have missed me. I looked like a road flare.”

“A naked road flare,” Josh said.

Eliot came in with a tureen full of viscous, unappetizing flip and began ladling it into teacups. Alice picked up her book and headed for the stairs.

“Hang on, I’m coming back with the hot ones!” Eliot called, busily grating nutmeg.

Quentin didn’t hang on. He followed Alice.

At first he’d thought everything would be different between him and Alice. Then he thought everything was back to normal. Now he understood that he didn’t want things to be back to normal. He couldn’t stop looking at her, even after she’d looked at him, seen him looking at her, and looked away in embarrassment again. It was like she’d become charged in some way that drew him to her uncontrollably. He could sense her naked body inside her dress, smell it like a vampire smells blood. Maybe Mayakovsky hadn’t quite managed to get all the fox out of him.

He found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was lying on one of a pair of twin beds, on top of the bedspread, reading. It was dim and hot. The roof slanted in at an odd angle. The room was full of odd, old furniture — a wicker chair with a staved-in seat, a dresser with a stuck drawer — and it had deep red wallpaper that didn’t match any other room in the house. Quentin yanked up the window halfway — it made an outraged squawk — and flopped down on the other twin bed.

“Can you believe they have these here? It’s a full set — they were in the bookcase in the bathroom.” She held up the book she was reading. Incredibly, it was an old copy of The World in the Walls .

“I had that exact same edition.” The cover showed Martin Chatwin halfway through the old grandfather clock, with his feet still in this world and his amazed head poking into Fillory, which was drawn as a groovy 1970s disco winter wonderland.

“I haven’t looked at them for years. God, remember the Cozy Horse? That big velvet horse that would just carry you around? I wanted one so badly when I was that age. Did you read them?”

Quentin wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his Fillory obsession.

“I may have taken a look.”

Alice smirked and went back to the book. “Why is it that you still think you can keep secrets from me?”

Quentin folded his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the low, tilted ceiling. This wasn’t right. There was something brother-sister about it.

“Here. Budge over.”

He switched beds and lay down next to Alice, hip-checking her sideways to make room on the narrow bed. She held up the paperback, and they read together silently for a few pages. Their shoulders and upper arms touched. Quentin felt like the bed was on a train moving very fast, and if he looked out the window he’d see the landscape racing past. They were both breathing very carefully.

“I never got it about the Cozy Horse,” Quentin said after a while. “First of all, there’s only one of it. Is there a whole herd of Cozy Horses somewhere? And then it’s too useful. You’d think somebody would have domesticated it by now.”

She whacked his head with the spine, not completely gently.

“Somebody evil . You can’t break the Cozy Horse, the Cozy Horse is a free spirit. Anyway it’s too big. I always figured it was mechanical — somebody made it somehow.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. A magician. Somebody in the past. Anyway the Cozy Horse is a girl thing.”

Janet stuck her head in. Apparently the exodus downstairs was general.

“Ha!” Janet brayed. “I can’t believe you’re reading that.”

Alice scooched an inch away from him, instinctively, but he didn’t move.

“Like you didn’t,” Quentin said.

“Of course I did! When I was nine I made my family call me ‘Fiona’ for two weeks.”

She vanished, leaving behind a comfortable, echoless silence. The room was cooling down as hot air ascended out through the half-open window. Quentin imagined it rising in an invisible braided plume into the blue summer day.

“Did you know there really was a Chatwin family?” he asked. “In real life? Supposedly they lived next door to Plover.”

Alice nodded. She unscooched now that Janet was gone. “It’s sad though.”

“Sad how.”

“Well, do you know what happened to them?”