That particular class had not been a successful one for Quentin. P.A. was held in a room that resembled a college chemistry lab: indestructible gray stone tables; counters mottled with ancient unspeakable stains; deep, capacious sinks. The air was thickly charged with permanent charms and wards installed by generations of Brakebills professors to prevent students from injuring themselves or each other. It carried a whiff of ozone.

Quentin watched his lab partner Surendra dust his hands with a white powder (equal parts flour and beech-wood ash), draw certain invisible sigils in the air with a freshly trimmed willow wand, and then bring the wand softly down on his marble (nickname: Rakshasa!), slicing it neatly in half with one stroke, first try. But when Quentin brought the willow wand down on his marble (nickname: Martin) it burst with a quiet pop, like a dying lightbulb, throwing off a spray of glass chunks and powder. Quentin dropped the wand and spun away to shield his eyes; everybody else in the room craned their heads to look. The atmosphere in the P.A. room wasn’t particularly collegial.

So Quentin was already in a foul mood when Professor March asked him to stay behind after class. March chatted with stragglers in the hall while Quentin sat on one of the indestructible tables, swinging his legs and thinking black thoughts. He was somewhat reassured that Alice had been asked to stay behind, too. She sat by the window staring dreamily out at the sluggish Hudson. Her marble floated in slow circles around her head, a lazy miniature satellite, sometimes clicking against the glass when she leaned too close. Why did magic come to her so effortlessly? he wondered. Or was it as effortless as it looked? He couldn’t believe it was as hard for her as it was for him. Penny was there, too, looking pale and intense and moon-faced as always. He wore the Brakebills uniform, but they’d let him keep his mohawk.

Professor March came back in, followed by Professor Van der Weghe. She didn’t mince words.

“We asked you three to stay behind because we are considering advancing you to Second Year for the spring term,” she said. “You would have to do some extra work on your own in order to pass your First Year exams in December and then catch up to the Second Years, but I think you’re up to it. Am I right?”

She looked around encouragingly. She wasn’t really asking them so much as telling them. Quentin and Penny and Alice glanced at one another uneasily and looked away again. From long experience Quentin had learned not to be surprised when his intellectual abilities were rated over other people’s, and this mark of favor certainly wiped out the nightmare of his pulverized marble, with interest. But everybody was acting very solemn and serious about it. It sounded like a lot of work for the privilege of skipping a year at Brakebills, which he wasn’t even sure he wanted to do anyway.

“Why?” Penny spoke up. “Why move us up? Are you going to move other students down to make room for us?”

He had a point. It was an immutable fact of life at Brakebills that there were always twenty students per class, no more and no fewer.

“Different students learn at different speeds, Penny,” was all she said. “We want to keep everybody where they’re most comfortable.”

There were no further questions. After a suitable interval Professor Van der Weghe accepted their silence as consent.

“All right then,” she said. “Good luck to all of you.”

Those words plunged Quentin into a new and darker phase of his life at Brakebills, just when he’d gotten comfortable with the old one. Until then he’d worked hard, but he got in his share of malingering like everybody else. He wandered around campus and killed time with the other First Years in the First Years’ lounge, which was a shabby but cozy room with a fireplace and an assortment of critically injured couches and armchairs and embarrassingly lame “educational” board games, basically magical versions of Trivial Pursuit, all warped and stained and missing crucial pieces and cards and spinners. They even had a contraband video-game console set up in a closet, a three-year-old box hooked up to an even older TV. It fuzzed out and rebooted whenever anybody fired up a spell within two hundred yards of it, which was pretty much constantly.

That was before. Now there was no time when Quentin wasn’t studying. As often as Eliot had warned him about what he was in for, and as hard as he’d worked up till now, he still somehow imagined that learning magic would turn out to be a delightful journey through a secret garden where he would gaily pluck the heavy fruit of knowledge from conveniently low-hanging branches. Instead every afternoon after P.A. Quentin went straight to the library to rush through his regular homework so he could betake himself after dinner to the library, where his appointed tutor waited for him.

His tutor was Professor Sunderland, the pretty young woman who had asked him to draw maps during his Examination. She looked nothing like a magician was supposed to: she was blond and dimply and distractingly curvy. Professor Sunderland taught mostly upper-level courses, Fourth and Fifth Years, and didn’t have much patience for amateurs. She drilled him relentlessly on gestures and incantations and charts and tables, and when he was perfect, that was a start, but she’d like to see Popper etudes No. 7 and No. 13 again, please, slowly, forward and then backward, just to make sure. Her hands did things Quentin couldn’t imagine his hands ever doing. It would have been intolerable if Quentin didn’t have a ferocious crush on Professor Sunderland.

He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It’s not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.

Quentin spent a lot more of his time with Alice and Penny now. Brakebills had an eleven-o’clock lights-out policy for First Years, but with their extra workload the three of them had to find a way around it. Fortunately there was a small study off one of the student wings that, according to Brakebills lore, was exempt from whatever monitoring spells the faculty used to enforce curfew. Probably they left it like that deliberately as a loophole for situations like this. It was a leftover space—musty, windowless, and trapezoidal—but it had a couch and a table and chairs, and the faculty never checked it after hours, so that was where Quentin, Alice, and Penny went when the rest of the First Years went to bed.

They made an odd little tribe: Alice sitting hunched over the table; Quen tin 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 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.

“Absolutely not!” Eric touched the tip of Eliot’s long, pale nose with his finger. “Not until you finish all your chores. Every single one. And take off that stupid shirt, it’s pathetic.”

Quentin got that it was a game they’d played before. He was watching a very private ritual.

“All right,” Eliot said petulantly. “And there is nothing wrong with this shirt,” he muttered.

Eric cut him off with a look. Then he spat, once, a white fleck on Eliot’s pristine shirtfront. Quentin saw the fear behind Eric’s eyes as he wondered if he’d gone too far. From this angle the armchair might have blocked Quentin’s view, but it didn’t quite as Eliot fumbled jinglingly with Eric’s belt buckle, then his fly, then jerked down his pants, exposing his thin, pale thighs.

“Careful,” Eric warned. There wasn’t much affection in his playacting, if that’s what it was. “Little bitch. You know the rules.”

Quentin couldn’t have said why he waited an extra minute before he ducked back down the ladder, back into his staid, predictable home universe, but he couldn’t stop watching. He was looking directly at the exposed wiring of Eliot’s emotional machinery. How could he not have known about this? He wondered if it was an annual thing, maybe Eliot went through a boy or two a year, anointing them and then discarding them when they no longer did the trick. Did he really have to hide like this? Even at Brakebills? On some level Quentin was hurt: If this was what Eliot wanted, why hadn’t he come after Quentin? Though as much as he longed for Eliot’s attention, he didn’t know if he could have gone through with it. It was better this way. Eliot wouldn’t have forgiven him for refusing.

The desperate hunger with which Eliot regarded the object on which he would perform his chores was unlike anything Quentin had ever seen. He was right in Eliot’s line of sight, but he never once glanced over at him.

Quentin decided he would do his reading elsewhere.

To his surprise Alice offered to come with him. Penny just stared at the green, overcast landscape in the mirror, waiting for his pale, stoic face to reappear so he could keep practicing. He didn’t look up as they left.

Quentin’s idea had been to walk out through the Maze and across the snowbound Sea to its outer edge, where he had first arrived, and look back at the hushed hulk of the House and think about why this was turning out to be so much less fun than it should have been and try to calm down enough to go to sleep. He supposed he could do that equally well with Alice as he could alone. He headed for the tall French doors that opened onto the back terrace.

“Not that way,” Alice said.

After hours the French doors were set to trigger a magical alert in the bedroom of whatever faculty member was on call, Infallible Alice explained, to discourage students from breaking curfew. She led him around to a side door he’d never seen before, unalarmed and concealed behind a tapestry, that opened out into a snow-covered hedge. They squeezed themselves through it and into the freezing darkness.

Quentin was easily eight inches taller than Alice, most of it in his legs, but she kept pace with him doggedly. They navigated the Maze together in the moonlight and set out across the frozen Sea. The snow was half a foot deep, and they kicked little spills of it ahead of them as they walked.

“I come out here every night,” Alice said, breaking the silence.

In his sleep-deprived state Quentin had almost forgotten she was there.

“Every night?” he said stupidly. “You do? Why?”

“Just . . . you know.” She sighed. Her breath puffed out white in the moonlight. “To clear my head. It gets noisy in the girls’ tower. You can’t think. It’s quiet out here.”

It was strange how normal it felt to be alone with the usually antisocial Alice. “It’s cold out here. You think they know you break curfew?”

“Of course. Fogg does, anyway.”

“So if he knows, why bother—”

“Why bother taking the side door?” The Sea was like a smooth clean sheet laid out around them, tucked in at the corners. Except for a few deer and wild turkeys, nobody else had been across it since the last snowfall. “I don’t think he really cares that much if we sneak out. But he appreciates it if you make an effort.”

They reached the edge of the great lawn and turned and looked back toward the House. One light was on, a teacher’s bedroom on a lower floor. An owl called. A hazy moon bleached the clouds white above the blocky outline of the roof. The scene was like an unshaken snow globe.

Quentin flashed on a memory from the Fillory books: the part in The World in the Walls when Martin and Fiona go wandering through the frozen woods looking for the trees the Watcherwoman has enchanted, each of which has a round ticking clock embedded in its trunk. As villains went the Watcherwoman was an odd specimen, since she rarely did anything particularly evil, or at any rate not where anybody could see her do it. She was usually glimpsed from a distance, rushing around with a book in one hand and an elaborate timepiece in the other; sometimes she drove a terrifyingly elaborate ormolu clock-carriage that ticked loudly as it raced along. She always wore a veil that covered her face. Wherever she passed she planted her signature clock-trees.

Quentin caught himself listening for ticking, but there was no sound except for an occasional frozen crack from deep in the forest, its origin unguessable.

“This is where I came through the first time,” he said. “In the summer. I didn’t even know what Brakebills was. I thought I was in Fillory.”

Alice laughed: a surprising, hilarious shout. Quentin hadn’t actually meant it to be quite that funny.

“Sorry,” she said. “God, I used to love those books when I was little.”

“So where did you come through?”

“Over there.” She pointed at an another, identical stretch of trees. “But I didn’t come through like you. I mean, through a portal.”

They must have had some special, extra-magical form of conveyance for Infallible Alice, he thought. It was hard not to envy her. A phantom toll-booth, or a chariot of fire, probably. Drawn by thestrals.

“When I came, I walked here? I wasn’t Invited?” She was talking in questions, with exaggerated casualness, but her voice was suddenly wobbly. “I had a brother who went here. I always wanted to come, too, but they never Invited me. After a while I was getting too old, so I ran away. I’d been waiting and waiting for an Invitation and it never came. I knew I’d already missed the first year. I’m a year older than you, you know.”

He hadn’t known. She looked younger.

“So I took a bus from Urbana to Poughkeepsie, then taxis from there, as far as I could. Did you ever notice there’s no driveway here? No roads either. The nearest one is the state highway.” This was the longest speech Quentin had ever heard Alice make. “I had them let me off on the shoulder, in the middle of nowhere. I had to walk the last five miles. I got lost. Slept in the woods.”

“You slept in the woods? Like on the ground?”

“I know, I should have brought a tent. Or something. I don’t know what I was thinking, I was just hysterical.”

“What about your brother? He couldn’t let you in?”

“He died.”

She offered this neutrally, purely informationally, but it brought Quen tin up short. He had never imagined that Alice could have a sibling, let alone a dead one. Or that she led anything other than a charmed life.

“Alice,” he said, “this doesn’t make any sense. You do realize you’re the smartest person in our class?”

She shrugged off the compliment with one shoulder, staring fiercely up at the House.

“So you just walked in? What did they do?”

“They couldn’t believe it. Nobody’s supposed to be able to find the House by themselves. They thought it was just an accident, but it’s so obvious there’s old magic here, tons of it. This whole place is wild with it—if you look at it through the right spells, it lights up like a forest fire.

“They must have thought I was a homeless person. I had twigs in my hair. I’d been crying all night. Professor Van der Weghe felt sorry for me. She gave me coffee and let me take the entrance Exam all by myself. Fogg didn’t want to let me, but she made him.”

“And you passed.”

She shrugged again.

“I still don’t get it,” Quentin said. “Why didn’t you get Invited like the rest of us?”

She didn’t answer, just stared up angrily at the hazy moon. There were tears on her cheeks. He realized that he had just casually put into words what was probably the overwhelming question of Alice’s entire existence at Brakebills. It occurred to him, long after it should have, that he wasn’t the only person here who had problems and felt like an outsider. Alice wasn’t just the competition, someone whose only purpose in life was to succeed and by doing so subtract from his happiness. She was a person with her own hopes and feelings and history and nightmares. In her own way she was as lost as he was.

They were standing in the shadow of an enormous fir tree, a shaggy blue-gray monster groaning with snow. It made Quentin think of Christmas, and he suddenly realized that they’d missed it. He’d forgotten they were on Brakebills time. Real Christmas, in the rest of the world, had been two months ago, and he hadn’t even noticed. His parents had said something about it on the phone, but the dime hadn’t dropped. Funny how things like that stopped mattering. He wondered what James and Julia had done for vacation. They’d talked about all of them going up to Lake Placid together. Her parents had a cabin there.

And what did matter? It was starting to snow again, fine particles settling on his eyelashes. What the hell was out there that was worth all this work? What were they doing it for? Power, he supposed, or knowledge. But it was all so ridiculously abstract. The answer should have been obvious. He just couldn’t quite name it.

Next to him Alice shuddered from the cold. She hugged herself.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here now, however you got here,” Quentin said awkwardly. “We all are.” He put an arm around her hunched shoulders. If she didn’t lean into him, or in any way admit to being comforted, she didn’t have a seizure either, which he was half afraid she would. “Come on, let’s get back before Fogg really does get pissed. And we’ve got an exam tomorrow. You don’t want to be too tired to enjoy it.”

The results were slipped under each of their doors early the following morning, on a piece of thick cream paper that looked like a wedding invitation, folded over once. Quentin had passed, Alice had passed, and Penny had failed.