by Lev Grossman
He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He’d hardly glanced at it before—he’d been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave—but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch. He thought about how Eliot had harvested it himself, from a clock-sapling in the Queenswood, and then carried it and kept it safe for him during all his months at sea. It was a great gift. He wished he’d appreciated it more at the time.
Though it had stopped ticking. Being on Earth didn’t seem to agree with it. Maybe it was the weather.
Quentin stared at his parents’ darkened house for a long time, waiting to feel an urge to go inside, but the urge never came. As dark and massive as it was the house exerted no gravitational pull on him. When he thought of his parents it was almost like they were old lovers, so distant now that he couldn’t even remember why his link to them had once seemed so real and urgent. They’d managed the neat trick of bringing up a child with whom they had absolutely nothing in common, or if there was something none of them had ever risen to the challenge of finding it.
Now they’d drifted so far apart that the silver thread connecting them had simply snapped. If he had a home anywhere, it wasn’t here.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and chanted four long, low syllables under his breath while at the same time making a big circle with his left hand. The rain began sheeting off an invisible lens over his head, and he felt, if not dryer, then at least that he had taken the first step on the long and arduous path to dryness.
Then he walked away down the wide wet suburban sidewalk. He was out of Fillory, and he wasn’t a king anymore. It was time to start living his damn life like everybody else. Better late than never. Quentin walked half an hour to the center of Chesterton, caught a bus from there to Alewife, took a subway to South Station, and got on a Greyhound bus bound for Newburgh, New York, north of Manhattan on the Hudson River, which was the closest you could get to Brakebills via public transportation.
Coming back was easier this time. Last time he’d been with Julia, and he’d been panicked and desperate. This time he was in no particular hurry, and he knew exactly what he needed: to be somewhere safe and familiar, where he had something to do, where people knew magic and knew him. What he needed was a job.
He stayed at the same motel as last time, then took a taxi to the same bend in the road and picked his way in through the damp forest from there. It had rained here too, and every twig and branch he brushed soaked him all over again with cold water. He didn’t bother with any fancy visualization spells this time. He figured they would see him, and that when they did they would know him for what he was.
He was right. Quentin spotted it a long way off through the trees: just a stray patch of sunlight on an otherwise overcast day. As he got closer it resolved itself into an oval of lighter, brighter air hanging there among the wet branches. The oval framed a woman’s disembodied head and shoulders, like a cameo in a locket. She was fortyish, with almond-shaped eyes, and though he didn’t recognize her she had the unmistakably alert air of a fellow practitioner.
“Hi,” Quentin said, when he was close enough that he didn’t have to shout. “I’m Quentin.”
“I know,” she said. “You coming in?”
“Thanks.”
She did something, made a small gesture somewhere out of view, and the portrait went full-length. She was standing in an archway of summer light and grass carved out of the gloomy autumn forest. She stood aside to let him pass.
“Thanks,” he said again. When the summer air hit him, tears of relief prickled unexpectedly at the corners of his eyes. He blinked and turned away, but the woman caught it.
“It never gets old, does it?”
“No,” he said. “It really doesn’t.”
—
Quentin went the long way around, bypassing the Maze—it would have been redrawn ten times over since the last time he knew it—and walked up to the House. The halls were quiet: it was August here, and there were no students to speak of, though if they hadn’t filled the incoming class yet they might still be holding entrance exams. Early afternoon sunlight fell undisturbed on the much-abused carpets in the common rooms. The whole building felt like it was resting and recovering after the catastrophe of the school year.
He didn’t know what to expect from Fogg: the last time they spoke they hadn’t parted on the best possible terms. But Quentin was here, and he was going to make his case. He found the dean in his office going through admissions files.
“Well!” Still groomed and goateed, the older man made a show of surprise. “Come in. I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”
Fogg smiled, though he didn’t get up. Quentin sat down, cautiously.
“I wasn’t expecting it either,” he said. “But it’s good to be here.”
“That’s always nice to hear. Last time I saw you I believe you had a hedge witch in tow. Tell me, did she get wherever it was she was going?”
She had, though by a long and circuitous route, and Quentin didn’t want to go into detail about it. Instead he inquired after the fortunes of the Brakebills welters team, and Fogg filled him in on that in all the detail he could have wanted and more. Quentin asked after the little metal bird that used to inhabit his office, and Fogg explained that someone had made it their doctoral project to turn it back into flesh and feathers. Fogg took out a cigar and offered one to Quentin; Quentin accepted it; they smoked.
It was all going more smoothly than he’d expected. He’d formed an idea of Fogg as a petty, spiteful tyrant, but now he began to wonder if the dean had changed, or if he’d gotten it wrong in the first place. Maybe Fogg wasn’t as bad as all that. Maybe he, Quentin, had always been a bit too sensitive and defensive around him. When Fogg asked Quentin how he could help him, Quentin told him.
And just like that, Fogg helped him. As luck would have it there was a vacancy in the faculty at the most junior level—a week earlier an incoming adjunct had had to be dismissed after it came out that he’d plagiarized most of his master’s thesis from Francis Bacon. Quentin could pick up his teaching load, if he liked. Really, he’d be doing Fogg a favor. If there was any Schadenfreude there, if Fogg took any pleasure from the sight of a newly chastened and humbled Quentin, the high-flying, adventure-having, mischief-managing prodigal son, coming crawling back begging for a handout, he hid it well.
“Don’t look so surprised, Quentin!” he said. “You were always one of the clever ones. Everyone saw it but you. If you hadn’t been so busy trying to convince yourself you didn’t belong here, you would have seen it too.”
Just as it had years ago Brakebills opened its doors to him, took him into itself, and offered him a place in its little secret hideaway world. From a pegboard Fogg gave him the keys to a room so small and with a ceiling so high that it was not unlike living at the bottom of an airshaft. It had a desk and a window and a bathroom and a bed, a narrow twin bed that had lost its twin. Its sheets had the unmistakable scent of Brakebills laundry, and the smell immediately sent Quentin dropping like a stone down a well of memory, back to the years he’d spent sleeping snugly wrapped up in Brakebills bedclothes, dreaming of a future very different from the one he now inhabited.
It wasn’t nostalgia exactly; Quentin didn’t miss the old days. But he did miss Fillory. It was only when he was finally alone in his room—not a king’s room, a teacher’s room, a very junior teacher’s room—with the door shut that Quentin allowed himself to really truly long for it. He yearned for it. He felt the full force of what he’d lost. He lay down and stared up at the faraway ceiling and thought of everything that was happening there without him, the journeys and adventures and feasts and all the various magical wonders, all across the length and breadth of Fillory, the rivers
and oceans and trees and meadows, and he wanted to be there so badly that it felt like his desire should be enough to physically pull him out of his flat hard bed, out of this world, and into the one he belonged in. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.
They gave him a teaching schedule. They gave him a seat in the dining room, and the authority to discipline students. They also gave him something he should have gotten long ago, something he’d almost forgotten he didn’t have: a discipline.
Every magician had a natural predisposition to a certain specific kind of magic. Sometimes it was something trivial, sometimes it was genuinely useful, but everyone had one: it was a kind of sorcerous fingerprint. But they’d never been able to find Quentin’s. As part of his induction into the Brakebills faculty Quentin was required to state his discipline, at which point it occurred to him that he still didn’t know what it was.
Just as they had a dozen years ago they sent him to Professor Sunderland, a woman with whom he’d been seethingly, volcanically infatuated when he was an undergraduate. She met him in the same long sunlit lab she’d worked in back then; it was weird to think that she’d been here this whole time while he’d been off careening disastrously around the multiverse, and that they were now, for most practical purposes, peers.
If anything she was even more beautiful than she had been at twenty-five. Her face had ripened and softened. She looked more like herself, though what he’d thought of at the time as her serene, otherworldly quality now felt a bit more like a slight lack of affect—he hadn’t noticed how withdrawn and shut-down she was.
He’d felt so far below her then, he wasn’t sure she’d even remember him. But she did.
“Of course I do. You weren’t quite as invisible as you thought you were.”
Had he thought that? Probably he had.
“Does that mean my secret crush on you wasn’t as secret as I thought it was?”
She smiled, but not unkindly.
“The concealment of crushes probably isn’t your discipline,” she said. “Roll up your sleeves, above your elbows. Let me see the backs of your hands.”
He showed her. She gave them a brisk rub with fine powder and an irregular pattern of tiny cold sparks appeared on his skin, like a sparsely populated countryside seen from above by night. He thought he felt a web of icy prickles too, though that could have been his imagination.
“Mmmmm.”
She chewed her lip, studying him, then she tapped his hands, one, two, like a child playing a game, and the sparks went out. There was nothing there that interested Professor Sunderland. Or Pearl—now that they were colleagues he should get in the habit of calling her by her first name.
She snipped a lock of his hair and burned it in a brazier. It smelled like burning hair. She scrutinized the smoke.
“Nope.”
Now that the pleasantries were out of the way she was all business. He could have been a tricky flower arrangement that she couldn’t get quite right. She studied him through a graduated series of smoked lenses while he walked backward around the room.
“Why do you think this is so difficult?” Quentin asked, trying not to run into anything.
“Mm? Don’t look over your shoulder.”
“My discipline? Why do you think it’s so hard to figure out?”
“Could be a few things.” She smoothed her straight blond hair back behind her ears and switched lenses. “It could be occluded. Some disciplines just by their natures don’t want to be found. Some are just really minor, pointless really, and it’s hard to pick them out of the background noise.”
“Right. Though could it also be”—he stumbled over a stool—“because it’s something interesting? That no one’s ever seen before?”
“Sure. Why not.”
He’d always envied Penny his fancy and apparently unique discipline, which was interdimensional travel. But from her tone he suspected she could have listed a few reasons why not.
“Remember when I made those sparks, that one time?”
“I remember. Aha. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Stand still.”
He stopped, and Pearl rummaged in a drawer and took out a heavy, brass-edged ruler marked in irregular units that Quentin didn’t recognize.
“Close your eyes.”
He did, and immediately an electric bar of pain flashed across the back of his right hand. He clamped it between his knees; it was ten seconds before he even recovered enough to say ow. When he opened his eyes he half expected to see his fingers sheared right off at the second knuckle.
They were still there, though they were turning red. She’d whacked them with the sharp edge of the ruler.
“Sorry,” she said. “The pain response is often very revealing.”
“Listen, if that doesn’t do it I think I’m all right with not knowing.”
“No, that did it. You’re very sensitive, I must say.”
Quentin didn’t think that not wanting to get smacked across the knuckles with a ruler made him unusually sensitive, but he didn’t say anything, and Pearl was already paging through a huge old reference book printed all in jewel type. Quentin had a sudden crazy urge to stop her. He’d been living with this for so long, it was part of who he was—he was the Man Without a Discipline. Was he ready to give that up? If she told him he’d be like everybody else . . .
But he didn’t stop her.
“I had a pet theory about you.” Pearl ran her finger down a column. “Which was that I couldn’t find your discipline last time because you didn’t have one yet. I always thought you were a bit young for your age. Personality is a factor—maturity. You were old enough to have a discipline, but emotionally you weren’t there yet. You hadn’t come into focus.”
That was kind of embarrassing. And like his crush, it had probably been obvious to more people than he realized.
“I guess I’m a late bloomer,” Quentin said.
“There you are.” She tapped the page. “Repair of small objects, that’s you.”
“Repair of small objects.”
“Uh-huh!”
He couldn’t honestly say that it was everything he’d hoped for.
“Small like a chair?”
“Think smaller,” she said. “Like, I don’t know, a coffee cup.” She shaped her hands around an invisible mug. “Have you had any special luck with that? Lesser bindings, reconstitutions, that kind of thing?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He couldn’t actually say that he’d ever noticed. Maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention.
It was a bit of an anticlimax. You couldn’t call it sexy, exactly. Not breaking new ground, so much. He wouldn’t be striding between dimensions, or calling down thunderbolts, or manifesting patroni, not on the strength of repair of small objects. Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.
But it wasn’t going to kill him. It wasn’t sexy, but it was real, and that was what mattered now. No more fantasies—that was life after Fillory. Maybe when you give up your dreams, you find out that there’s more to life than dreaming. He was going to live in the real world from now on, and he was going to learn to appreciate its rough, mundane solidity. He’d been learning a lot about himself lately, and he’d thought it would be painful, and it was, but it was a relief too. These were things he’d been scared to face his whole life, and now that he was looking them in the eye they weren’t quite as scary as he thought.
Or maybe he was tougher than he thought. At any rate he wouldn’t have to be retroactively expelled from the Physical Kids. Repair of small objects would have made the cut.
“Off you go,” Pearl said. “Fogg will probably have you take over the First Year class on Minor Mendings.”
“I expect he will,” Quentin said.
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And he did.
CHAPTER 3
Quentin thought he’d find teaching satisfying, but he didn’t actually expect to enjoy it. That seemed like too much to hope for. But as it turned out he did enjoy it.
Five mornings a week at nine A.M. he stood up in front of Minor Mendings, chalk in hand, scribbled lecture notes in front of him, and looked out at the students—his students now—and they looked back at him. Mostly their faces were blank—blank with terror, blank with total confusion, blank with boredom, but blank. Quentin realized now that that must be how he used to look. When you were just one of the class you tended to forget the professor could see you.
His first lecture was not a success. He stuttered; he repeated himself; he lost his train of thought and stopped cold, dead air, while he tried to figure out where he’d been going with this a second ago. He’d prepared ten points he wanted to cover, but he was so afraid that he’d run out of material that he dragged out the first point for half an hour and then had to rush through the other nine at top speed to fit them all in. It turned out that teaching was a skill you had to learn, like everything else.
But gradually it dawned on him that he at least knew what he was talking about. His track record in life and love wasn’t exactly flawless, but he did possess a large amount of practical information about the care and feeding of supernatural forces, and teaching was just a matter of getting that information out of his head and into the clever, receptive heads of his students in orderly installments. It was a long way from running a secret magical kingdom, but then again Fillory had never really needed him that badly, had it. Fillory pretty much ran itself. Whereas these kids, floundering as they were in the choppy, frigid waters of introductory gramarye, would have been lost without him. They needed him, and it felt good to be needed.
