In the end he went home for five days. And for a moment, as he was climbing the front stairs, and the good old familiar home smell descended on him, a lethal enchantment compounded of cooking and paint and Oriental rugs and dust, when he saw his mother’s toothy, exasperated smile and his dad’s hale, stubbly good humor, he became the person that he used to be around them again, and he felt the gravitational pull of the little kid he once was and in some unswept back corner of his soul always would be. He gave in to the old illusion that he’d been wrong to leave, that this was the life he should be living.

But the spell didn’t hold. He couldn’t stay. Something about his parents’ house was unbearable to him now. After his little curved tower-top room, how could he go back to his dingy old bedroom in Brooklyn with its crumbly white paint and its iron bars on the window and its view of a tiny walled-in dirt patch? He had nothing to say to his well-meaning, politely curious parents. Both their attention and their neglect were equally intolerable. His world had become complicated and interesting and magical. Theirs was mundane and domestic. They didn’t understand that the world they could see wasn’t the one that mattered, and they never would.

He came home on a Thursday. On Friday he texted James, and on Saturday morning he met up with James and Julia at an abandoned boat launch on the Gowanus. It was hard to say why they liked this place, except that it was roughly equidistant from their homes and fairly secluded—it was at the end of a dead-end street that butted up against the canal, and you had to climb over a corrugated-metal barrier to get to it. It had the quiet stillness of any place that was close to open water, however stagnant and poisonous that water might be. There was a kind of concrete barricade you could sit on while you troubled the viscous surface of the Gowanus with handfuls of stray gravel. A burnt-out brick warehouse with arched windows loomed over the scene from the opposite bank. Somebody’s future luxury condo.

It was good to see James and Julia again, but it was even better to see himself seeing them, and to see how much he had changed. Brakebills had rescued him. He was no longer the shoe-gazing fuck-up he’d been the day he left, James’s sidekick and Julia’s inconvenient suitor. When he and James exchanged their gruff hellos and cursory handshake-hugs, he didn’t feel that instinctive deference he used to feel around James, as if he were the hero of the piece and not Quentin. When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn’t gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over—just the shrapnel they couldn’t remove.

It hadn’t occurred to Quentin that they might not be completely glad to see him. He knew he’d left abruptly, without explanation, but he had no idea how hurt and betrayed they would feel. They all sat together, three in a row, looking out at the water, as Quentin extemporized a breezy account of the obscure but still highly selective educational institution that he was for some reason attending. He kept the curriculum as vague as possible. He focused on architectural details. James and Julia huddled together stiffly against the March chill (it was March now in Brooklyn) like an elderly married couple on a park bench. When it was his turn, James rattled on about senior projects, the prom, teachers Quentin hadn’t thought about once in six months—it was incredible that all this stuff was still going on, and that James still cared about it, and that he couldn’t see how everything had changed. Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal.

And Julia—something had happened to his delicate, freckly Julia while he was away. Was it just that he didn’t love her anymore? Was he seeing her clearly for the first time? But no, her hair was longer now, and it was flat and lank—she had done something to tamp down the waviness—and there were dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Before she only ever smoked at parties, but now she lit cigarette after cigarette, one off the other, feeding each one down the end of a hollow steel fencepost when she was done. Even James seemed unnerved by her, tense and protective. She observed them both coolly, her black skirt blowing around her bare knees. Afterward he couldn’t have said for sure whether she’d even spoken at all.

That night, already jonesing for a taste of the magical world he’d just left, Quentin rifled through his old paperbacks for a Fillory novel and stayed up till three in the morning rereading The Flying Forest, one of the more incidental, less satisfying installments in the series, which featured Rupert, the goofy, feckless Chatwin brother. He and pretty, princessy Fiona find their way into Fillory via the upper branches of Rupert’s favorite climbing tree and spend the novel searching for the source of a ticking sound that’s keeping their friend Sir Hotspots (he’s a leopard, with exceptionally sharp ears) from sleeping.

The culprits turn out to be a tribe of dwarves who have hollowed out an entire mountain of copper-bearing rock and fashioned it into an immense timekeeping device (Quentin had never noticed before how obsessed Plover was with clockwork). In the end Rupert and Fiona enlist a friendly giant to simply bury the clock deeper with his enormous mattock, muffling its monstrous ticking noise, thereby mollifying both Sir Hotspots and the dwarves, who, as cave dwellers, liked being buried. Then they repair to the royal residence, Castle Whitespire, an elegant keep cunningly constructed as a giant clockwork mechanism. Wound by windmills, a great brass main-spring beneath the castle moved and rotated its towers in a slow, stately dance.

Now that he had been to Brakebills and knew something about real magic he could read Plover with a more critical eye. He wanted to know the technical details behind the spells. And why were the dwarves building that giant clock in the first place? And the denouement didn’t strike him as especially final—it reminded him too much of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Nothing stays buried forever. And where was the flying forest in The Flying Forest? Where were Ember and Umber, the stately twin rams who patrolled Fillory and kept order there? Though they rarely showed up till after the Chatwins had already taken care of things for them. Their real function seemed to be to make sure the Chatwins didn’t overstay their welcome—it was Ember and Umber who regularly evicted them and sent them back to England at the end of each book. It was Quentin’s least favorite thing about the series. Why couldn’t they just let them stay? Would that have been so bad?

It was obvious that Christopher Plover didn’t know anything about real magic. He wasn’t even really English: according to the flap copy he was an American who’d made a quick fortune in dry goods in the 1920s and moved to Cornwall just ahead of the stock market crash. A confirmed bachelor, as the saying goes, he embraced Anglophilia, began pronouncing his name the English way (“Pluvver”), and set himself up as a country squire in a vast home crammed with staff. (Only an American Anglophile could have created a world as definitively English, more English than England, as Fillory.) Legend had it that there actually was a family of Chatwin children, who lived next door to him. Plover always claimed that the Chatwin children would come over and tell him stories about Fillory, and that he just wrote them down.

But the real mystery of The Flying Forest, endlessly analyzed by zealous fans and slumming academics, lay in the final few pages. With the ticking problem taken care of, Rupert and Fiona are settling down to a celebratory feast with Sir Hotspots and his family—including an appealingly slinky leopard bride and any number of adorable fuzzy leopard kittens—when who should turn up but Martin, the eldest Chatwin child, who first discovered Fillory two books ago in The World in the Walls.

Martin is thirteen years old by now, a pubescent teenager, almost too old to be adventuring in Fillory. In earlier books he was a changeful character, whose moods swung from cheerful to black without warning. In The Flying Forest he’s in his depressive phase. It’s not long before he picks a fight with the younger, more dependably sunny Rupert. Some very English yelling and wrestling ensues. The Hotspots clan observes the proceedings with amused leopardly coolth. Breaking away, his shirt untucked and missing a button, Martin shouts at his siblings that it was he who had discovered Fillory, and it was he and not they who should have gotten to go on the adventure. And it wasn’t fair: Why did they always have to go home afterward? He was a hero in Fillory and nothing at home. Fiona icily tells him not to behave like a child. Martin stalks away into the dense Darkling Woods, weeping wimpy English schoolboy tears.

And then . . . he never returns. Fillory swallows him whole. Martin is absent from the next two books—A Secret Sea and the last book in the series, The Wandering Dune—and although his siblings hunt for him diligently, they never find him again. (Now it made Quentin think of poor Alice’s brother.) Like most fans Quentin assumed that Plover meant to bring Martin back in the last book of the series, restored and repentant, but Plover died unexpectedly in his fifties while The Wandering Dune was still in manuscript, and nothing in his papers ever suggested an answer to the riddle. It was an insoluble literary mystery, like Dickens’s unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Martin would always remain the boy who vanished into Fillory and never came back.

Quentin thought the answer might have been in the book he’d possessed so briefly, The Magicians, but it was long gone. He’d turned the House inside out and interrogated everybody in it, and by this point he’d given up. Someone at Brakebills must have taken it or tidied it up or lost it. But who, and why? Maybe it hadn’t even been real.

Quentin woke up early that Sunday morning already in fully fledged flight mode. He was spinning his wheels here. He had his new life to get on with. Feeling only the barest required minimum of guilt, he improvised an elaborate fictional confection for his parents—rich roommate, ski chalet in New Hampshire, I know it’s last minute but could he please? More lies, but what could you do, that was how you rolled when you were a secret teenage magician. He packed hurriedly—he’d left most of his clothes at school anyway—and half an hour later he was out on the streets of Brooklyn. He went straight to the old community garden. He walked into the thickest part of it.

He ended up at the back fence, looking through it at the rusting play set in a neighbor’s yard. Could it really be this small? He remembered the garden as practically a forest, but now it looked thin and scraggly. For several minutes he tramped around through the rubble and broken weeds and pumpkin corpses frozen in the act of rotting, back and forth, feeling more and more nervous and embarrassed. What did he do last time? Did he need the book? He must be missing something, but he couldn’t think what. The magic wasn’t happening. He tried to retrace his steps exactly. Maybe it was the wrong time of day.

Quentin went to get a slice of pizza and take stock, praying that nobody he knew would walk by and see him there when he was supposed to be on his way to Mount Alibi in New Hampshire. He didn’t know what to do. The trick wasn’t working. It was all falling away from him. He sat there in a booth with his bags next to him staring at his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors—why do all pizzerias have mirrored walls?—and reading the police blotter in the Park Slope free weekly. The walls reflected each other, mirrors on mirrors, an infinite curving gallery. And as he sat there, the long, narrow, busy room became still around him, almost without his knowing it. The mirrors became dark, the light changed, the bare tile became a polished parquet floor, and when he looked up from the paper again he was eating his slice alone in the junior common room at Brakebills.

There was no particular rush to embrace the two newcomers. The promotion had effectively turned Quentin and Alice into a class of two: the First Years resented them and the Second Years ignored them. Alice wasn’t the star of the show anymore, the Second Years had stars of their own, principally a loud, bluff, broad-shouldered girl with straight dishwater hair named Amanda Orloff who was regularly called on to demonstrate techniques for the class. The daughter of a five-star Army general, she did magic in a gruff, unshowy, devastatingly competent way with her big, blocky hands, as if she were solving an invisible Rubik’s cube. Her thick fingers wrung the magic out of the air by main force.

The other students all assumed Quentin and Alice were friends already, and probably a couple, which in a funny way had the effect of calling into being a bond between them that hadn’t really had time to form yet. They were more comfortable with each other since she’d told him the painful secret of her arrival at Brakebills. She seemed to have been liberated by her late-night confession: she didn’t seem so fragile all the time—she didn’t always speak in that tiny, whispery voice, and he could make fun of her, and with some prompting he could get her to make fun of him, too. He wasn’t sure they were friends, exactly, but she was unfolding a little. He felt like a safecracker who—partly by luck—had sussed out the first digit in a lengthy, arduous combination.

One Sunday afternoon, tired of being shunned, Quentin went and found his old lab partner Surendra and dragged him out of the House for a walk. They wound their way out through the Maze in their overcoats, headed nowhere in particular, neither of them very enthusiastically. The sun was out, but it was still painfully cold. The hedges were heavy with melting ice, and snow was still piled up in the shadowy corners. Surendra was the son of an immensely wealthy Bengali-American computer executive from San Diego. His round, beatific face belied the fact that he was the most brutally sarcastic person Quentin had ever met.

Somehow on their way out to the Sea a Second Year girl named Gretchen attached herself to them. Blond and long-legged and slender, she was built like a prima ballerina except for the fact that she had a severe, clunking limp—something congenital having to do with a knee ligament—and walked with a cane.

“Tally ho, boys.”

“It’s the gimp,” Quentin said.

She wasn’t embarrassed about her leg. She told anybody who would listen that that’s where her power came from, and if she had it surgically corrected she wouldn’t be able to do magic anymore. Nobody knew if it was true or not.

They walked together as far as the edge of the grass, the three of them, then stopped. Maybe this had been a mistake, Quentin thought. None of them seemed to know which way to go, or what they were doing there. Gretchen and Surendra barely knew each other anyway. For a few minutes they talked about nothing—gossip, exams, teachers—but Surendra didn’t get any of the Second Year references, and every time he missed one his sulk deepened. The afternoon wobbled on its axis. Quentin picked up a wet stone and threw it as far as he could. It bounced silently on the grass. The wet made his ungloved hand even colder.

“Walk this way!” Gretchen said finally, and struck off across the Sea at an angle with her weird, rolling gait, which despite its awkwardness covered a lot of ground. Quentin wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh or not. They walked down a narrow gravel path, through a thin scrim of leafless poplar trees, and into a small clearing on the very outer fringe of the grounds.

Quentin had been here before. He was looking at a curious Alice-in-Wonderland playing field laid out in squares, with a broad margin of lawn around it. The squares were about a yard on a side, like a giant chessboard, though the grid was longer than it was wide, and the squares were different materials: water, stone, sand, grass, and two squares made of silvery metal.

The grass squares were neatly trimmed, like a putting green. The water squares were dark, glistening pools reflecting the windblown blue sky overhead.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what is it,” Surendra said.

“Do you want to play?” Gretchen walked around to the other side of the checkerboard, skirting the field. A tall white-painted wooden chair stood at midfield, like a lifeguard’s chair, or a judge’s chair at a tennis match.

“So this is a game?”

Surendra slit his eyes at him.

“Sometimes I really don’t get you,” he said. It was dawning on him that he knew something Quentin didn’t. Gretchen gave Surendra a conspiratorial look of shared pity. She was one of those people who assumed an attitude of instant intimacy with people she barely knew.

“This,” she said grandly, “is welters!”

Quentin was pretty much resigned to death by scorn. “So it’s a game.”

“Oh, it’s so much more than a game,” Gretchen said.

“It’s a passion,” Surendra said.

“It’s a lifestyle.”

“It’s a state of mind.”

“I can explain it to you, if you have about ten years.” Gretchen blew into her hands. “Basically one team stands at one end and one team stands at the other end and you try to capture squares.”

“How do you capture a square?”

Gretchen waggled her fingers in the air mysteriously. “With maaaaagic! ”

“Where’s the broomsticks?” Quentin was only half joking.

“No broomsticks. Welters is more like chess. They invented it about fifty million years ago. I think it was originally supposed to be a teaching aid. And some people say it was an alternative to dueling. Students kept killing each other, so they got them playing welters instead.”

“Those were the days.”

Surendra tried a standing long jump over a water square, but he slipped as he took off, shorted it, and caught one heel in the water.

“Shit!” He looked up at the freezing blue sky. “I hate welters!”

A crow took flight from the top of a winter elm. The sun was subsiding behind the trees in a frozen swirl of pink cirrus.

Surendra walked off the board, swinging his arms.

“I can’t feel my fingers. Let’s go in.”

They walked back down the path in the direction of the Sea, not talking, just blowing on their hands and rubbing them together. It was getting even colder as the sun went down. The trees were already black against the sky. They would have to hurry to change for dinner. A powerful feeling of late-afternoon futility was descending on Quentin. A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.

As they crossed the lawn Quentin found himself being quizzed about Eliot.

“So are you really friends with that guy?” Surendra said.

“Yeah, how do you even know him?”

“I don’t really. He mostly hangs out with his own crowd.” Quentin was secretly proud to be connected with Eliot, even if in reality they hardly spoke to each other anymore.

“Yeah, I know,” Surendra said. “The Physical Kids. What a bunch of losers.”

“What do you mean, Physical Kids?”

“You know, that whole clique. Janet Way and the fat one, Josh Hoberman—those guys. They all do physical magic for their Disciplines.”

In the Maze their white breath streamed up against the darkness of the box hedges. Surendra explained that starting with the Third Year students chose a specific magical topic to specialize in, or, more exactly, had it chosen for them by the faculty. Then students were divided into groups based on their specialties.

“It doesn’t matter that much, except that Disciplines map loosely to social groups—people tend to hang out mostly with their own kind. Physical’s supposed to be the rarest. They’re a little snobby about it, I guess. And anyway Eliot, you know about him.”

Gretchen raised her eyebrows and leered. His nose was red from having been out in the cold. By now they had reached the terrace, and the pink sunset was smeared anamorphically all over the wavy glass in the French doors.

“No, I don’t think I do know,” Quentin said stiffly. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“You don’t know?”

“Oh my God!” In ecstasy Gretchen put her hand on Surendra’s arm. “I bet he’s one of Eliot’s—!”

At that moment the French doors opened and Penny came striding quickly toward them, stiff-legged, his shirt untucked, no jacket on. His pale round face came looming up out of the dusk. His expression was blank and fixed, his walk hyperanimated by a crazy energy. As he got closer he took an extra little skip step, cocked his arm back, and punched Quentin in the face.

There was a freeze-frame moment of Penny’s fist, close-up and huge, like a comet passing dangerously close to the Earth, and then a flashbulb went off in Quentin’s right eye. It was a straight shot, and he half spun away and brought up his hand to touch the spot in the universal gesture of I’ve-just-been-punched-in-the-face. He was still trying to get his mind around what had just happened when Penny hit him again. This time Quentin ducked enough that he caught it on his ear.

“Ow!” Quentin yelled, scrambling backward. “What the hell?”

Dozens of windows looked out on the terrace from the House, and Quentin had a blurred impression of rows of fascinated faces pressed up against them.

Surendra and Gretchen stared at Quentin in white-faced horror, their mouths open, as if what was happening were his fault. Penny obviously had some theatrical notions about how a fight should go, because he was bouncing on his feet and doing little fake jabs and weaving his head around like boxers in movies.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Quentin shouted at him, more shocked than hurt.

Penny’s jaw was clenched, and his breath hissed in and out between his teeth. There was saliva on his chin, and his eyes looked weird—the phrase “fixed and dilated” flashed through Quentin’s mind. Penny aimed a big roundhouse punch at Quentin’s head, and Quentin flinched away violently, ducking and covering his head with his arms. He recovered enough to grab Penny around the waist while he was still off balance.

They staggered back and forth like a pair of drunken waltzers, leaning on each other for support, then crashed into a shrubbery at the edge of the terrace. It dropped its payload of snow on them. Quentin was a couple of inches taller than Penny, and his arms were longer, but Penny was made of more solid stuff and could throw him around. A low stone bench cut them off at the knees, and they both fell over, Penny on top.

The back of Quentin’s head hit the stone terrace hard. Lightning flashed. It hurt, but at the same time it had the effect of sweeping away all of Quen tin’s fear, and most of his conscious thoughts, like somebody sweeping the dishes off a table with both arms. In their place it substituted blind rage.

They rolled over each other, both trying to get in a punch and grabbing at the other one’s arms so he couldn’t. There was blood: Penny had cut his forehead open somehow. Quentin wanted to get up so they could box. He wanted to deck Penny, lay him out flat. He was vaguely aware of an enraged Gretchen trying to hit Penny with her stick and hitting him instead.

He was on top and just about had his fist free for a good hard shot when he felt strong arms encircle his chest, almost tenderly, and lift him back and up. With Quentin’s weight off him Penny popped up on his toes like an electric toy, breathing hard, red running down his face, but there were people between them now, the crowd had enveloped them, Quentin was being pulled backward. The spell was broken. The fight was over.

He still felt a little off—he wasn’t in pain, but it was like he was wearing deep-sea diving gear, clumping in slow motion through the hallways, heavy and weightless at the same time, brushing past the curious fish that peered at him and then quickly skittered away. The kids his age and younger regarded his battered face with awe—his ear was swollen, and he had a monster black eye. The older kids found the whole thing funny. Quentin decided to roll with the amusement. He did his best to project calm good humor. For a moment Eliot’s face swam in front of him with a look of sympathy that made Quentin’s eyes flood with hot tears that he viciously suppressed. It turned out it had been Eliot and those very same Physical Kids, speak of the devil, who had broken up the fight. Those powerful, gentle arms that pulled him off Penny belonged to Eliot’s friend Josh Hoberman—the fat one.

He’d missed most of dinner, so he sat down as they were serving dessert, which seemed consistent with the backward quality of the whole day. They waived the rule about late arrivals. He couldn’t shake the thickheaded feeling—he watched the world through a long-range lens, heard it through a tumbler pressed against a wall. He still hadn’t figured out what the fight had been about. Why would Penny hit him? Why would anybody do that? Why come to somewhere like Brakebills just to screw it up by being an asshole?

He figured he should probably eat something, but the first bite of flour-less chocolate cake turned to sticky glue in his mouth, and he had to sprint to make it to the bathroom before he threw up. At which point a massive gravitational field gripped him and pressed him roughly and irrevocably down against the grimy bathroom floor, as if a giant had slapped him down with his mighty hand and then, when he was down far enough, leaned on him with all his weight, smooshing him down into the cool, dirty tiles.

Woke up might have been putting it too strongly. The focus wasn’t sharp, and his brain wasn’t completely sure that its integrity was uncompromised. Quentin knew Brakebills had an infirmary, but he’d never been there before. He didn’t even know where it was. He’d passed through another secret portal, this time into the world of the sick and injured.

A woman was fussing over him, a pretty woman. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but he felt her cool, soft fingertips moving over his skull.

He cleared his throat, tasted something bitter.

“You’re the paramedic. You were the paramedic.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Past tense is better, that was a one-time performance. Though I won’t say I didn’t enjoy myself.”

“You were there. The day I came here.”

“I was there,” she agreed. “I wanted to make sure you made it to the Examination.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I come here sometimes.”

“I’ve never seen you here.”

“I make a point of not being seen.”

A long pause followed, during which he might have slept. But she was still there when he opened his eyes again.

“I like the hair,” he said.

She was no longer wearing her paramedic’s uniform, and her dark hair was up, held in place with chopsticks, revealing more of her small, jewel-like face. She had seemed so young before, and she didn’t look any different now, but he wondered. She had the gravity of a much older woman.

“Those braids were a bit much,” she said.

“That man who died—what really happened to him? Why did he die?”

“No special reason.” A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows. “He wasn’t supposed to, he just did. People do.”

“I thought it might have something to do with my being there.”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your sense of self-importance. Turn over on your stomach.”

Quentin did, and she dabbed the back of his head with a liquid that smelled sharply and stung.

“So it didn’t mean anything?”

“Death always means something. But no, nothing apart from the usual. There, all done. You have to take care of yourself, Quentin. We need you in fighting trim.”

He rolled onto his back again. His pillow had grown cool while she worked. He closed his eyes. He knew that a more alert Quentin would be working harder to zero in precisely on who she was, and what part she was playing in his story, or he in hers. But he couldn’t.

“That book you gave me,” he said. “I think I lost it. I didn’t have a chance to read it.”

In his depleted, borderline demented state the loss of the Fillory book suddenly seemed very sad, a tragedy beyond all possibility of redemption. A warm tear rolled down his cheek and into his ear.

“Hush,” she said. “It wasn’t time yet. You’ll find it again, if you look hard enough. That much I can promise you.”

It was the kind of thing people always said about Fillory. She placed something cool on his burning forehead, and he lost consciousness.

“You had a concussion,” somebody said.

It might have been the voice that finally woke him up. It had been calling his name. He recognized it, but he couldn’t place it. It was calm and familiar in a way he found comforting.

“Hey, Q. Q? Are you awake? Professor Moretti said you had a concussion.”

It was Penny’s voice. He could even see the pale oval of Penny’s face, propped up on pillows, across the aisle from him and one bed down.

“That’s why you threw up. It must have been when we fell over that bench. You hit your head on the ground.” All the crazy anger had drained out of Penny. He was positively chatty now.

“Yeah. I know I hit my head,” Quentin said slowly, thickly. “It was my head.”

“It won’t affect your mental functioning, if you’re wondering about that. That’s what Moretti said. I asked.”

“Well that’s a relief.”

A long silence passed. A clock ticked somewhere. There was a lovely sequence in the last Fillory book, The Wandering Dune, when little Jane, the youngest Chatwin, catches a bad cold and spends a week in bed talking to the Drawing Master on board the good ship Windswept, attended to by soft, sympathetic bunnies. Quentin had always liked Jane. She was different from the other Chatwins: more thoughtful, with an unpredictable sense of humor and a sharper edge than her slightly saccharine, Dick-and-Jane siblings.

He wondered what time it was.

“What about you?” he said numbly. He wasn’t so sure he was willing to make nice just yet. “Did you get hurt?”

“I cut open my forehead on your tooth. And you broke my nose when you head-butted me. They fixed it with a Pulaski’s Mending. I’ve never seen it done like that before, at least not on a human being. She used goat’s milk.”

“I didn’t even know I head-butted you.”

Penny was quiet again. Quentin counted thirty ticks of the clock.

“Do you have a black eye?” Penny said. “I can’t see.”

“Huge one.”

“Thought so.”

There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Quentin gulped it gratefully and fell back on the pillow. Hot veins of pain flashed through his head. Whatever the paramedic had done, or whoever she was, he still had some healing to do.

“Penny. Why the hell did you hit me like that?”

“Well, I think I had to,” Penny said. He sounded a little shocked that Quentin would even ask.

“You had to.” Maybe he wasn’t too tired after all. “But I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t do anything.” Penny chuckled woodenly. His voice was oddly cool, as if he’d rehearsed this speech, his closing argument, many times. Behind it Quentin could hear that weird manic anger ramping back up. “You could have talked to me, Quentin. You could have shown me a little respect. You and your little girlfriend.”

Oh, God. Was this really how it was going to be?

“Penny, who are you even talking about? Are you talking about Alice?”

“Oh, come on, Quentin. You sit there, you give each other little looks, you laugh at me. Openly. Would you believe I actually thought it was going to be fun? That we were all going to work together? Would you believe I actually thought that?”

Quentin recognized Penny’s aggrieved tone. Once his parents had rented out the parlor floor of their brownstone to an apparently sane little man, an actuary, who had left them increasingly high-handed notes requesting that they stop videotaping him every time he took out the trash.

“Don’t be an ass,” Quentin said. He didn’t see this as a rise-above-it situation. What, was Penny going to come over and give him another concussion? “Do you even know what you look like to the rest of the world? You sit there with your big-ass punk attitude, and you expect people to come around begging to hang out with you?”

Penny was sitting up now.

“That night,” he said, “when you and Alice went off together. You didn’t apologize, you didn’t ask me, didn’t say goodbye, you just walked right out. And then, and then,” he finished triumphantly, “you passed? And I failed? How is that fair? How is that fair? What did you expect me to do?”

So that was it. “That’s right, Penny,” Quentin said. “You definitely should have hit me in the face because you didn’t pass a test. Why don’t you go hit Professor Van der Weghe, too?”

“I don’t take things lying down, Quentin.” Penny’s voice was very loud in the empty infirmary. “I don’t want trouble. But if you come after me, I swear to you that I will get right back in your face. That’s just how it works. You think this is your own private fantasy world? You think you can do whatever you want? You try to walk all over me, Quentin. I’m going to come right back at you!”

They were both talking so loudly that Quentin didn’t even notice when the infirmary door opened and Dean Fogg came in, dressed in an exquisitely embroidered silk kimono and a Dickensian nightcap. For a second Quentin thought he was holding a candle before he realized it was Fogg’s upraised index finger that was softly glowing.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly.

“Dean Fogg—” Penny began as if here, finally, was a voice of reason he could appeal to.

“I said that’s enough.” Quentin had never heard the Dean raise his voice, and he didn’t now. Fogg was always a faintly ridiculous figure in the daytime, but now, at night, wreathed in his kimono, in the alien confines of the infirmary, he looked powerful and otherworldly. Wizardly. “You’re not going to speak again except to answer my questions. Is that clear?”

Did that count as a question? To be safe Quentin just nodded. His head hurt worse now.

“Yes sir,” Penny said promptly.

“I have heard absolutely enough about this. Who instigated this appalling incident?”

“I did,” Penny said instantly. “Sir. Quentin didn’t do anything, he had nothing to do with it.”

Quentin said nothing. That was the funny thing about Penny. He was insane, but he did have his insane principles, and he stuck to them.

“And yet,” Fogg said, “somehow your nose found its way into the path of Quentin’s forehead. Will it happen again?”

“No, sir.”

“No.”

“All right.” Quentin heard springs chirp as the Dean sat down on an empty bed. He didn’t turn his head. “There is only one thing that pleases me about this afternoon’s altercation, which is that neither of you resorted to magic to hurt each other. Neither of you is advanced enough in your studies to understand this properly, but in time you will learn that wielding magic means working with enormously powerful energies. And controlling those energies requires a calm and dispassionate mind.

“Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells . . . if you lose control of them, they will change you. Consume you. Transform you into something not human, a niffin, a spirit of raw, uncontrolled magical energy.”

Fogg regarded them both with stern composure. Very dramatic. Quen tin looked up at the infirmary’s pressed-tin ceiling stubbornly. His consciousness was guttering and fading. Where was the part where he told Penny to stop being a dick?

“Listen to me carefully,” Fogg was saying. “Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die.

“But you live in the magical world, and it’s a great gift. And if you want to get killed here, you’ll find plenty of opportunities without killing each other.”

He stood up to go.

“Will we be punished, sir?” Penny asked.

Punished? He must honestly believe they were still in high school. The Dean paused at the door. The light from his finger was almost extinguished.

“Yes, Penny, as a matter of fact you will be. Six weeks of washing dishes, lunch and dinner. If this or anything like it happens again, you’re expelled. Quentin—” he stopped to consider. “Just learn to handle yourself better. I don’t want any more problems.”

The door closed behind him. Quentin exhaled. He closed his eyes, and the room drifted silently off its moorings and out to sea. He wondered, with no special interest either way, whether Penny was in love with Alice.

“Wow,” Penny said, apparently unfazed by the prospect of spending the next month and a half with pruny fingertips. He sounded like a little kid. “I mean, wow. Did you hear what he said? About magic consuming you? I didn’t know any of that. Did you know any of that stuff ?”

“Penny,” Quentin said. “One, your hair is stupid. And two, I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but if you ever do anything that could get me sent back to Brooklyn again, I won’t just break your nose. I will motherfucking kill you.”