ELIOT. THE MISSING BOY. THE PHYSICAL KIDS

Six months later, in September, Quentin and Alice spent the first day of their Third Year at Brakebills sitting outside a small square Victorian outbuilding about a half mile from the House. It was a piece of pure folly architecture, a miniature house, white with a gray roof, complete with windows and gables, that might at one time have been servants’ quarters, or a guest cottage, or a largish garden shed.

There was a weathervane on top, wrought iron and shaped like a pig, that always pointed somewhere other than where the wind was blowing. Quentin couldn’t make out anything through the windows, but he thought he heard snatches of conversation coming from inside. The cottage stood on the edge of a wide hayfield.

It was midafternoon. The sky was blue and the early autumn sun was high. The air was silent and still. A rusted-out old piece of farm machinery stood half drowned in the same long grass it used to mow.

“This is bullshit. Knock again. ”

“You knock, ” Alice said. She released a convulsive sneeze. “I’ve been knocking for twenty. . . for twenty. . . ”

She sneezed again. She was allergic to pollen.

“Bless you. ”

“Twenty minutes. Thank you. ” She blew her nose. “They’re in there, they just won’t open the door. ”

“What do you think we should do? ”

Quentin thought for a minute.

“I don’t know, ” he said. “Maybe it’s a test. ”

Back in June, after finals, all twenty members of the Second Year had been marched through the Practical Applications room one at a time to be assigned their Disciplines. The sessions were scheduled at two-hour intervals, though sometimes it took longer; the entire process lasted three days. It was a circus atmosphere. Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point? But it was traditional for every student to have one, so a Discipline every student would have. Alice called it her magic bat mitzvah.

The P. A. lab was transformed for the occasion. All the cabinets were open, and every inch of the counters and tabletops was crammed with old instruments made of wood and silver and etched brass and worked glass. There were calipers and bulbs and beakers and clockwork and scales and magnifying glasses and dusty glass bulbs full of wobbling mercury and other less easily identifiable substances. Brakebills was largely dependent on Victorian-era technology. It wasn’t an affectation, or not entirely; electronics, Quentin was told, behaved unpredictably in the presence of sorcery.

Professor Sunderland presided over the circus. Quentin had avoided her as much as possible since that horrible, dreamlike period when she tutored him during his first semester. His crush on her had faded to a faint but still pathetic echo of its former self, to the point where he could almost look at her and not want to fill his hands with her hair.

“I’ll be with you in just one minute! ” she said brightly, busily repacking a set of very fine, sharp-looking silver instruments in a velvet carrying case.

“So. ” She snapped the case shut and latched it. “Everybody at Brakebills has an aptitude for magic, but there are individual variations—people tend to have an affinity for some specific strain. ” She delivered this speech by rote, like a stewardess demonstrating in-flight safety procedures. “It’s a very personal thing. It has to do with where you were born, and where the moon was, and what the weather was like, and what kind of person you are, plus all kinds of technical stuff that’s not worth getting into. There are two hundred or so other factors which Professor March would be happy to list for you. It’s one of his specialties. In fact I think Disciplines are his Discipline. ”

“What’s your Discipline? ”

“It’s related to metallurgy. Any other personal questions? ”

“Yes. Why do we have to go through all this testing? Can’t you just figure my Discipline out from my birthday and all that stuff you just mentioned? ”

“You could. In theory. In practice it would just be a pain in the ass. ” She smiled and put her blond hair up and secured it with a clip, and a sharp shard of his old yen for her pierced Quentin’s heart. “It’s much easier to go at it inductively, from the outside in, till we get a hit. ”

She placed a bronze scarab in each of his hands and asked him to recite the alphabet, first in Greek, then in Hebrew, which he had to be prompted on, while she studied him through what looked like a many-crooked collapsible telescope. He could feel the metal beetles crackling and buzzing with old spells. He had a horrible fear that their little legs would suddenly start wriggling. Occasionally she would stop and have him repeat a letter while she adjusted the instrument by means of protruding screws.

“Mm, ” she said. “Uh-huh. ”

She produced a tiny bonsai fir tree and made him stare at it from different angles while it ruffled its tiny needles in response to a wind that wasn’t there. Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately.

“Well, you’re not an herbalist! ” she said.

Over the next hour she tested him in two dozen different ways, only a few of which he understood the point of. He ran through basic First Year spells while she watched and measured their effectiveness with a battery of instruments. She had him read an incantation while standing next to a large brass clock with seven hands, one of which circled its face backward and with disconcerting speed. She sighed heavily. Several times she took down sagging, overweight volumes from high shelves and consulted them for long, uncomfortable intervals.

“You’re an interesting case, ” she said.

There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.

He sorted pearl buttons of various sizes and colors into different piles while she studied his reflection in a silver mirror. She tried to get him to take a nap so she could pry into his dreams, but he couldn’t fall asleep, so she put him under with one sip of a minty, effervescent potion.

Apparently his dreams didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She stared at him for a long minute with her hands on her hips.

“Let’s try an experiment, ” she said finally, with forced liveliness. She smiled thinly and tucked a stray strand of hair back behind her ear.

Professor Sunderland walked down the length of the room closing the dusty wooden shutters with a clatter until it was dark. Then she cleared the clutter off a gray slate tabletop and boosted herself up onto it. She yanked her skirt down over her knees and motioned for him to sit facing her on the table opposite.

“Go like this, ” she said, holding up her hands as if she were about to conduct an invisible orchestra. Unladylike half-moons of sweat bloomed under the arms of her blouse. He went like this.

She led him through a series of gestures familiar to him from Popper, though he’d never seen them put together in quite that combination. She whispered some words he didn’t catch.

“Now go like this. ” She flung her hands up over her head.

When she did it, nothing happened. But when Quentin mirrored her, streams of fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing—it was like they’d been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.

The relief was almost unbearable. He did it again and a few more sparks flew out, weaker this time. He watched them trail down around him. The third time he got only one.

“What does it mean? ” he asked.

“I have no idea, ” Professor Sunderland said. “I’ll put you down as Undetermined. We’ll try again next year. ”

“Next year? ” Quentin watched with a rising sense of disappointment as she jumped down off the table and started reopening shutters, window by window. He winced at the sunlight flooding in. “What do you mean? What am I going to do till then? ”

“Wait, ” she said. “It happens. People put too much importance on these things. Be a darling and send in the next student, would you? We’re already running late, and it’s only noon. ”

The summer dragged by in slow motion. It was really the fall, of course, in the world outside Brakebills, and the Brooklyn Quentin came home to for summer vacation was chilly and gray, the streets plastered with wet brown leaves and mashed ginkgo balls that smelled like vomit.

He haunted his old house like a ghost—it took a special effort to make himself visible to his parents, who always looked vaguely surprised when their phantom son requested their attention. James and Julia were away at college, so Quentin took long walks. He visited the branching, angular Gowanus Canal, its water the green of pooled radiator fluid. He shot baskets on deserted courts with missing nets and rainwater puddles in the corners. The autumn cold gave the ball a dead, inert feel. His world wasn’t here, it was elsewhere. He traded desultory e-mails with friends from Brakebills—Alice, Eliot, Surendra, Gretchen—and flipped indifferently through his summer reading, an eighteenth-century History of Magic that appeared quite slim from the outside but turned out to contain, by some subtle bibliographical magic, no fewer than 1, 832 pages.

In November he received a cream-colored envelope, which turned up tucked by invisible hands into History of Magic. It contained a stiff letter-pressed card with an elegant engraving of the Brakebills crest, inviting him to return to school at six in the evening by way of a narrow, never-used alleyway next to the First Lutheran Church ten blocks from his house.

He dutifully presented himself at the correct address at the appointed time. This late in the fall the sun set at four thirty in the afternoon, but it was unseasonably mild out, almost warm. Standing there at the entrance to the passageway, looking around for stray vergers who might charge him with trespassing—or worse, offer him spiritual guidance—cars whooshing by in the street behind him, he had never felt so absolutely sure that he was delusional, that Brooklyn was the only reality there was, and that everything which had happened to him last year was just a fanboy hallucination, proof that the boredom of the real world had finally driven him totally and irreversibly out of his mind. The alley was so skinny he practically had to turn sideways to walk down it, his two overstuffed Brakebills duffel bags—they were midnight blue with dark brown trim, school colors—scraping against the sweating stone walls on either side. He was overwhelmingly certain that in thirty seconds he would be standing at the blank wall at the end of the alley.

But then an impossible breath of warm, sweet, late-summer air came wafting toward him from the far end of the alleyway, accompanied by the chirping of crickets, and he could see the green expanse of the Sea. As heavy as his bags were he ran toward it.

Now it was the first day of the semester, and Quentin and Alice were stranded in a baking hot meadow outside a precious white Victorian bungalow. The bungalow was where the students who did Physical Magic met on Tuesday afternoons for their weekly seminar.

When she was tested, Alice displayed a highly technical Discipline involving light manipulation—phosphoromancy, she said it was called—that placed her in Physical Magic. Quentin was there because Physical was the group that had both the fewest total members and the fewest incoming members, so that seemed like the best place to stash him until he had a Discipline of his own. The first seminar had been scheduled for 12: 30, and Quentin and Alice had even gotten there early, but now it was almost five, and they’d been out there all afternoon. They were hot and tired and thirsty and annoyed, but neither of them wanted to give up and go back up to the House. If they were going to be Physical Kids, apparently they would have to prove it by getting in the front door.

They sat under a massive spreading beech tree that stood nearby, coolly indifferent to their plight. They leaned back against the trunk with a fat hard gray root between them.

“So what do you want to do, ” Quentin said dully. Tiny motes drifted by in the late-afternoon sunlight.

“I don’t know. ” Alice sneezed again. “What do you want to do? ”

Quentin plucked at the grass. A burst of faint laughter came from inside the house. If there was a password they hadn’t found it. He and Alice had spent an hour looking for hidden writing—they scanned the door in every spectrum they could think of, visible and invisible, infrared to gamma, and tried to strip the paint off to look underneath, but it wouldn’t come. Alice even tried some advanced graphological enchantments on the squiggly grain of the wood itself, but it just stared back at them blankly. They’d sent currents of force twisting into the lock, jiggling the tumblers, but they couldn’t pick it. They looked for a fourth-dimensional path around the door. They’d jointly plucked up their nerve and summoned a kind of phantasmal axe—it wasn’t explicitly against any rule they could think of—but they couldn’t even scratch it. For a while Alice was convinced the door was an illusion, that it didn’t even exist, but it certainly looked and felt real, and neither of them could find any charms or enchantments to dispel.

“Look at it, ” Quentin said. “It’s like some lame Hansel and Gretel hut. I thought the Physical Kids were supposed to be cool. ”

“Dinner’s in an hour, ” Alice said.

“I’ll skip it. ”

“It’s lamb tonight, with a rosemary crust. Potatoes au dauphin. ” Alice’s eidetic memory retained odd details.

“Maybe we should have our own seminar. Out here. ”

She snorted. “Yeah, that’d show ’em. ”

The beech tree was on the edge of a field that had just been mown. The giant cinnamon rolls of hay dotting the field cast long shadows.

“You’re a what again? A photomancer? ”

“Phosphoromancer. ”

“What can you do? ”

“I’m not sure yet. I practiced some things over the summer. Focusing light, refracting it, bending it. If you bend light around something, it turns invisible. But I want to understand the theory of it first. ”

“Show me something. ”

Alice turned shy. It didn’t take much.

“I can hardly do anything. ”

“Look, I don’t even have a Discipline. I’m a nothingmancer. I’m a squatmancer. ”

“They just don’t know what it is yet. You have your little sparky thing. ”

“Same difference. And don’t make fun of my sparky thing. Now bend me some damn light. ”

She grimaced, but she got up on her knees on the grass and held up her hand, fingers spread. They were kneeling face-to-face, and he was suddenly aware of her full breasts inside her thin, high-necked blouse.

“Watch the shadow, ” she snapped.

She did something with her fingers, and the shadow of her hand disappeared. It was simply gone, leaving behind only a few ghostly rainbow highlights.

“Nice. ”

“It’s pathetic, I know. ” She waved her hand, scrubbing out the magic. “My whole hand is supposed to go invisible, but I can only do the shadow. ”

There was something here. Quentin felt his sulk starting to dispel. This was a test. Physical magic. They weren’t Morris dancing with tree spirits here. This was a brute-force problem.

“What about the other way? ” he said slowly. “Could you focus light instead, like a magnifying glass? ”

She didn’t answer right away, but he could see her nimble mind take hold of the problem and start turning it over.

“Maybe if I. . . hm. I think there’s something in Culhwch and Owen. You’d need to stabilize the effect, though. And localize it. ”

She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and spoke five long words over it. Quentin could see light bending inside the circle, warping and distorting the leaves and grass visible through it. Then it sharpened and focused to a white dot that burned an afterimage into his retina, and he looked away. She tilted it, and the ground under her hand smoked.

“I will kill you if you get me kicked out of Brakebills. Do you understand me? I’m not joking. I know how to do it. I will literally make you die. ”

“That’s funny, that’s exactly what I told Penny after he hit me, ” Quentin said.

“Except I’ll really do it. ”

They had decided to burn their way through the door. If it was a test, Quentin reasoned, it didn’t matter much how they solved it as long as they solved it. They hadn’t been given any rules, so they couldn’t be breaking any. And if they did burn down the damn house, with Eliot and his smug little friends inside it, serve them right.

They had to work fast, because the sunlight was fading. The sun had already gone dull and coppery, and in another few minutes its lower rim would touch the tops of the trees on the far side of the hayfield. The barest early-fall chill was in the air. Yellow lights were already on inside the house. Quentin heard—did he imagine it? —the pop of a cork being withdrawn from a bottle.

Holding both arms above her head and curved slightly upward, like she was balancing a large invisible basket on her head, Alice had created the magical equivalent of a magnifying glass a dozen yards across—her bent arms defined a small section of the total circumference of a soaring circular lens, the upper edge of which was even with the top of the beech tree, taller than the chimney of the little Victorian bungalow. Quentin could just make out the edge of the lens as a curved distortion in the air. The focal point was too bright to look at.

Alice stood about fifty feet back from the door. Quentin stood closer, to one side, holding out a hand to shield his eyes and shouting out directions:

“Up! Okay, slow! A little more! Keep moving! Okay, now right! ”

Quentin could feel the heat from the focused sunlight against his face and smell the savory-sweet smell of wood smoke, along with an acrid tang of seared house paint. The door was definitely vulnerable to heat. They’d been worried that there wouldn’t be enough sunlight left, but Alice’s spell was cutting a nice deep charred trench in the wood. They’d decided to cut the door in half laterally, and if the trench wasn’t penetrating all the way through, it must be pretty close. A bigger problem was Alice’s aim, which wasn’t good, and in one place she had wandered off the door and burned a groove in the wall.

“I feel stupid! ” Alice shouted. “How are we doing? ”

“Looking good! ”

“My back hurts! Are we almost done? ”

“Almost! ” he lied.

With a foot to go Alice expanded the spell’s radius to compensate for the fading sun. She was whispering, but he wasn’t sure if it was an incantation or just obscenities. Quentin realized they were being observed: one of the older professors, a very erect, white-haired man named Brzezinski, who specialized in potions and whose pants were always covered with appalling stains, had interrupted his evening stroll to watch them. In another lifetime he had given Quentin the test involving knots during his Examination. He wore sweater-vests and smoked a pipe and looked like an IBM engineer, circa 1950.

Shit, Quentin thought. They were about to get busted.

But Professor Brzezinski just took his pipe out of his mouth. “Carry on, ” he said gruffly. He turned and walked back in the direction of the House.

It took only about ten minutes for Alice to make a full lateral cut, then go back across it a second time. The trench glowed red.

When she was finished, Quentin walked back to where she was standing.

“You have ash on your face, ” she said. She brushed at his forehead with her fingers.

“Maybe we should go across again. You know, just to be sure. ” If this didn’t work, he was out of ideas, and he didn’t think he could spend the night out here. He also didn’t think he could face going back to the House in defeat.

“There’s not enough light. ” She looked drained. “By the end the lens was probably out to a quarter mile. After that it just loses coherence. Falls apart at the edges. ”

A quarter mile? Quentin thought. How powerful is she?

His stomach rumbled. It was fully dusk now, and the sky was a luminous blue. They stared at the scarred, blackened door. It looked worse than he thought—Alice’s aim had strayed on the second pass, so in places there were two separate trenches. If this was wrong, Eliot was going to kill him.

“Should I try to kick it in? ”

Alice pulled her mouth to one side. “What if there’s somebody behind it? ”

“So what do you suggest? ”

“I don’t know. ” She picked at one of the burnt parts that had cooled. “I think we’re almost through. . . ”

There was an old iron knocker on the door in the shape of a disembodied hand holding an iron ball. It was bolted on.

“Okay, ” Quentin said. “Stand back. ”

God, please let this work. He got a good grip on the iron hand, put one foot on the door, uttered a long falsetto martial arts yell, and threw his weight backward. The top half of the door swung open with no resistance whatsoever—it must have been hanging on by a few flakes of ash. He fell down backward on the path.

A girl Quentin recognized as one of the Fourth Years stood in the doorway with warm light streaming out into the twilight around her, holding a glass of dark red wine in one hand. She looked down at him coolly. Alice was leaning against the side of the house laughing so hard that no sound was coming out.

“Dinner’s almost ready, ” the girl said. “Eliot made an amatriciana sauce. We couldn’t get any guanciale, but I think bacon works fine. Don’t you? ”

In spite of the heat a fire popped and flickered in the fireplace.

“Six hours, twelve minutes, ” said a fat young man with wavy hair sitting in a leather club chair. “That’s actually about par. ”

“Tell them how long it took you, Josh, ” said the girl who’d met them at the door. Quentin thought her name was Janet.

“Twenty hours, thirty-one minutes. Longest night of my life. Not a record, but pretty close. ”

“We thought he was trying to starve us out. ” Janet poured out the rest of a bottle of red wine into two glasses standing on a sideboard and handed them to Quentin and Alice. Two more empty bottles stood on the floor, though the others didn’t seem especially drunk.

They were in a shabby but comfortable library lined with threadbare rugs and lit by candles and firelight. Quentin realized that the little house must be larger on the inside than it was on the outside; it was also a lot cooler—the atmosphere was that of a nice, chilly fall evening. Books overflowed the bookcases and stood in wobbly stacks in the corners and even on the mantelpiece. The furniture was distinguished but mismatched, and in places it was severely battered. In between the bookcases the walls were hung with the usual inexplicable artifacts that accumulate in private clubs: African masks, dreary landscape paintings, retired ceremonial daggers, glass cases full of maps and medals and the deteriorating corpses of exotic moths that had presumably been captured at great effort and expense. Quentin felt overheated and underdressed but mostly just relieved to finally be inside.

There were only five of them, counting himself and Alice. Eliot was there, scanning one of the bookshelves and acting like he hadn’t noticed them yet. He seemed to be trying to make a serious argument about magical theory to somebody, but nobody was listening

“Tinkerbell, we have guests, ” Janet said. “Please turn around and face the room. ” She was lean and animated, with a serious, somewhat anachronistic pageboy haircut. She was the loud one: Quentin had seen her holding forth to the others on walks through the Maze and making speeches over dinner in the dining room.

Eliot broke off his monologue and turned around. He was wearing an apron.

“Hello, ” he said, not missing a beat. “Glad you could make it. Alice, I understand you burned our door in half. ”

“Quentin helped. ”

“We watched you out the window, ” Josh said. “You’re hella lucky Brzezinski didn’t catch you with that axe. ”

“What’s the correct solution? ” Alice asked. “I mean, I know it worked, but there must be a better way. ”

She took a timid sip of her wine, immediately followed by a less timid one.

“There isn’t one, ” Janet said. “Or not a good one, anyway. That’s part of the point. This is Physical Magic. It’s messy. It’s crude. As long as you don’t knock the building down, it counts. And if you did it would probably still count. ”

“How did you do it? ” Alice asked shyly. “I mean, when it was your turn? ”

“Froze and shattered it. I do a special kind of cold magic, that’s my Discipline. Sixty-three minutes. And that is a record. ”

“It used to be you could say ‘friend’ in Elvish and it would let you in, ” Josh said. “Now too many people have read Tolkien. ”

“Eliot, darling, I think our dinner must be ready, ” Janet said. Her attitude toward Eliot was hard to read, a weird combination of tenderness and contempt. She clapped her hands. “Josh, maybe you could do something about. . . ? ” She gestured in the direction of the half-demolished door. “The mosquitoes are getting in. ”

Still dazed, Quentin trailed Eliot into the kitchen, which was, again, larger and nicer than really seemed plausible from the outside, with white cabinets up to the high ceiling and soapstone counters and an aerodynamic-looking 1950s refrigerator. Eliot sloshed some wine from his glass into a pan of red sauce on the stove.

“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink, ” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink. ”

He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that he’d ignored Quentin for the past year. It was like it never happened.

“So you have this whole place to yourself? ” Quentin didn’t want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here.

“Pretty much. So do you, now. ”

“Do all the Disciplines have their own clubhouses? ”

“It’s not a clubhouse, ” Eliot said sharply. He dumped a huge clump of fresh pasta into a tall pot of boiling water and stirred it to break it up. “This’ll cook in about a minute flat. ”

“Then what is it? ”

“Well, all right, it is a clubhouse. But don’t call it that. We call it the Cottage. We have the seminars here, and the library isn’t bad. Sometimes Janet paints in the bedroom upstairs. Only we can get in here, you know. ”

“What about Fogg? ”

“Oh, and Fogg, though he never bothers. And Bigby. You know Bigby, right? ”

Quentin shook his head.

“I can’t believe you don’t know Bigby! ” Eliot said, chuckling. “God, you’re going to love Bigby. ”

He tasted the sauce, then glugged in a slug of heavy cream and stirred it in in widening circles. The sauce paled and thickened. Eliot had a jaunty, offhanded confidence at the stove.

“All the groups have a place like this. The Naturals have this deeply lame treehouse off in the forest. The Illusionists have a house just like this one, though only they know where it is. You have to find it to get in. Knowledge just has the library, the poor suckers. And Healing has the clinic—”

“Eliot! ” Janet’s voice came from the other room. “We’re starving. ” Quentin wondered how Alice was faring out there.

“All right, all right! I hope you don’t mind pasta, ” he added, to Quentin. “It’s all I made. There’s bruschetta out there, or there was. At least there’s lots of wine. ” He drained the pasta in the sink, sending up a huge gout of steam, and dumped it into the pan to finish in the sauce. “God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?

“Richard was the real cook around here. I don’t know if you knew him, he graduated last year. Tall. Total grind, made us all look bad in front of Bigby, but at least he could cook. Grab those two bottles there, would you? And the corkscrew? ”

With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware, some of which bordered on light hand-to-hand weaponry, the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. The food was simple but not at all bad. He’d forgotten he was starving. Janet performed a trick—Quentin wasn’t sure whether it was magical or just mechanical—to shorten the long seminar table into a dinner table.

Janet, Josh, and Eliot gossiped about classes and teachers and who was sleeping with whom and who wanted to sleep with whom. They speculated endlessly about other students’ relative strengths as spellcasters. They maneuvered around one another with the absolute confidence of people who had spent huge amounts of time together, who trusted and loved one another and who knew how to show one another off to best advantage and how to curb each other’s boring and annoying habits. Quentin let the chatter wash over him. Eating a sophisticated meal, alone in their own private dining room, felt very adult. This was it, he thought. He had been an outsider before, but now he had really entered into the inner life of the school. This was the real Brakebills. He was in the warm secret heart of the secret world.

They were arguing about what they would do after they graduated.

“I imagine I’ll retreat to some lonely mountaintop, ” Eliot said airily. “Become a hermit for a while. I’ll grow a long beard and people will come to me for advice, like in cartoons. ”

“Advice about what? ” Josh snorted. “About whether a dark suit counts as black tie? ”

“And I’d like to see you try to grow a beard, ” Janet added. “God, you’re self-centered. Don’t you want to help people? ”

Eliot looked puzzled. “People? What people? ”

“Poor people! Hungry people! Sick people! People who can’t do magic! ”

“What have people ever done for me? People don’t want my help. People called me a faggot and threw me in a Dumpster at recess when I was in fifth grade because my pants were pressed. ”

“Well, I hope for your sake there’s a wine cellar on your mountaintop, ” Janet said, annoyed. “Or a full bar. You won’t last eight hours without a drink. ”

“I will brew a crude but potent beverage from local herbs and berries. ”

“Or dry cleaning. ”

“Well, that is a problem. You can use magic, but it’s never the same. Maybe I’ll just live at the Plaza, like Eloise. ”

“I’m bored! ” Josh bellowed. “Let’s do Harper’s Fire-Shaping. ”

He went over to a large cabinet full of dozens of tiny drawers, narrow but deep, that turned out to be a kind of miniature twig library. Each drawer bore a tiny handwritten label, starting with Ailanthus in the upper left-hand corner and ending with Zelkova, Japanese, in the lower right. Harper’s Fire-Shaping was a useless but extremely entertaining spell for stretching and leading a flame into elaborate calligraphic shapes that flared for a moment in midair and then disappeared. You did it with an aspen twig. The evening devolved into attempts to shape the candle flames into increasingly elaborate or obscene words and shapes, which in turn led, inevitably, to the curtains catching on fire (apparently not for the first time) and having to be extinguished.

A halt was called. Eliot produced a slender, dangerous-looking bottle of grappa. Only two of the candles had survived the fire-shaping, but nobody bothered to replace the others. It was late, after one in the morning. They sat there in the half darkness in contented silence. Janet lay on her back on the carpet staring up at the ceiling, her feet propped up on Eliot’s lap. There was a funny physical intimacy between the two of them, especially considering what Quentin knew about Eliot’s sexual appetites.

“So this is it? We’re full-fledged Physical Kids now? ” The grappa was like a fiery seed that had drifted into Quentin’s chest and taken root there. The seed gave birth to a hot, glowing sapling, which grew and spread and unfolded into a big warm leafy tree of good feeling. “Don’t we have to be hazed or branded or, I don’t know, shaved or something? ”

“Not unless you want to be, ” Josh said.

“Somehow I thought there would be more of you, ” Quentin said. “Of us. ”

“This is it, ” Eliot said. “Since Richard and Isabel graduated. There aren’t any Fifth Years. Nobody placed in. If we didn’t get anybody this year, Fogg was talking about merging us with Natural. ”

Josh shuddered theatrically.

“What were they like? ” Alice asked. “Richard and Isabel? ”

“Like fire and ice, ” Josh said. “Like chocolate and marzipan. ”

“It’s different without them, ” Eliot said.

“Good riddance, ” said Janet.

“Oh, they weren’t so bad, ” Josh said. “You remember when Richard thought he could bring the weathervane to life? He was going to make it move around by itself. He must have been up there for three days rubbing it with fish oil and I don’t even want to think about what else. ”

“That was unintentionally funny, ” Janet said. “Doesn’t count. ”

“You just never got the point of Richard. ”

Janet snorted.

“I got plenty of Richard, ” she said, with surprising bitterness.

A tiny hush fell. It was the first false note of the evening.

“But now we have a quorum again, ” Eliot said quickly, “an eminently respectable quorum. Physical Magic always gets the best ones. ”

“To the best ones, ” Josh said.

Quentin raised his glass. He was up in the lofty branches of his fiery tree, swaying in the warm alcoholic breeze.

“The best ones. ”

They all drank.

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