Cleansing the auditorium was just a matter of ringing a few bells and burning sage in the corners, but resetting the school’s main wards took a solid week; according to student rumor they were all cinched to an enormous worked-iron totem kept in a secret room at the campus’s exact geographical center, wherever that was, but nobody had ever seen it. Professor March, who after his ordeal never quite lost a certain anxious, hunted look, roamed endlessly in and out of the school’s many basements and sub-basements and cellars and catacombs, where he obsessively tended and reinforced the foundation spells that secured them against attack from below. The Third Years had made a bonfire at their Equinox party, but now the faculty made a real bonfire, fed with specially prepared cedar logs, dried and peeled and as straight as railroad ties, stacked in an arcane, eye-bending configuration like a giant Chinese puzzle that took Professor Heckler all day to get right. When he finally lit it, using a twist of paper with words scribbled on it in Russian, it burned like magnesium. They were discouraged from looking directly at it.

In a way it was an education in itself, a chance to watch real magic being worked, with real things at stake. But there was no fun in it. There was only silence at dinner, and useless anger, and a new kind of dread. One morning they found the room of a First Year boy cleared out; he’d dropped out and gone home overnight. It was not uncommon to come across conclaves of three or four girls—girls who mere weeks earlier had actively avoided sitting next to Amanda Orloff at dinner—perched together on the stony rim of a fountain in the Maze, weeping and shivering. There were two more fights. As soon as he was satisfied that the foundations were taken care of, Professor March went on sabbatical, and those who claimed to know—i.e., Eliot—put the odds of his ever coming back at approximately zero.

Sometimes Quentin wished he could run away, too. He thought he would be shunned for the little joke he’d played on March with the podium, but the strange thing was that nobody said anything about it. He almost wished they would. He didn’t know whether he’d committed the perfect crime or a crime so public and unspeakable that nobody could bring themselves to confront him about it in broad daylight. He was trapped: he couldn’t grieve properly for Amanda because he felt like he’d killed her, and he couldn’t atone for killing her because he couldn’t confess, not even to Alice. He didn’t know how. So instead he kept his little particle of shame and filth inside, where it could fester and turn septic.

This was the kind of disaster Quentin thought he’d left behind the day he walked into that garden in Brooklyn. Things like this didn’t happen in Fillory: there was conflict, and even violence, but it was always heroic and ennobling, and anybody really good and important who bought it along the way came back to life at the end of the book. Now there was a rip in the corner of his perfect world, and fear and sadness were pouring in like freezing filthy water through a busted dam. Brakebills felt less like a secret garden and more like a fortified encampment. He wasn’t in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad, bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren’t their fault.

A week after the incident Amanda Orloff ’s parents came to collect her things. No special fuss was made over them, at their request, but Quentin happened by one afternoon while they were saying goodbye to the Dean. All of Amanda’s belongings fit into one trunk and one pathetically small paisley-fabric suitcase.

Quentin’s heart seized up as he watched them. He was sure they could see his guilt; he felt like he was covered in it, sticky with it. But they ignored him. Mr. and Mrs. Orloff looked more like siblings than husband and wife: both six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with dishwater hair, his high and tight, hers in a businesslike shag. They seemed to be walking in a daze—Dean Fogg was guiding them by the elbows around something Quentin couldn’t see—and it took him a minute to figure out that they were heavily enchanted, so that even now they wouldn’t understand the nature of the school that their daughter had attended.

“We have to have a welters team,” Janet announced one day.

“No,” Eliot said, “we don’t.”

He lay with one arm over his face on an old leather couch. They were in the library in the Cottage, exhausted from having done nothing all day.

“Yes, actually we do, Eliot.” She nudged him sharply in the ribs with her foot. “Bigby told me. There’s a tournament. Everybody has to play. They just haven’t announced it yet.”

“Shit,” Eliot, Alice, Josh, and Quentin all said in unison.

“I call equipment manager,” Alice added.

“Why?” Josh moaned. “Why are they doing this to us? Why, God? ”

“It’s for morale,” Janet said. “Fogg says our spirits need elevating after last year. Organized welters is part of a ‘return to normalcy.’ ”

“My morale was fine until a minute ago. Fuck, I can’t stand that game. It’s a perversion of good magic. A perversion, I say!” Josh waved a finger at nobody in particular.

“Too bad, it’s compulsory. And it’s by Discipline, so we’re a team. Even Quentin”—she patted his head—“who still doesn’t have one.”

“Thanks for that.”

“I vote Janet captain,” Eliot said.

“Of course I’m captain. And as captain it is my happy duty to inform you that your first practice is in fifteen minutes.”

Everybody groaned and stirred and then settled themselves more comfortably where they were.

“Janet?” Josh said. “Stop doing this.”

“I’ve never even played,” Alice said. “I don’t know the rules.”

She lay on the rug paging limply through an old atlas. It was full of ancient maps in which the seas were populated with lovingly engraved marginal monsters, though in these maps the proportions were inverted, and the monsters were far larger and more numerous than the continents. Alice had acquired a pair of uncharacteristically hip rectangular glasses over the summer.

“Oh, you’ll pick it right up,” Eliot said. “Welters is fun—and educational!”

“Don’t worry.” Janet leaned down and gave the back of Alice’s head a maternal kiss. “Nobody really knows the rules.”

“Except Janet,” Josh said.

“Except me. I’ll see you all there at three.”

She flounced happily out of the room.

In the end it came down to the fact that none of them had anything better to do, which Janet had clearly been counting on. They reassembled by the welters board looking bedraggled and unpromising in the baking summer heat. It was so bright out you could barely stand to look at the grass. Eliot clutched the sticky decanter of port, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up. Just seeing it made Quentin feel dehydrated. Blue summer sky blazed in the water squares. A grasshopper collided with Quentin’s pants and clung there.

“So,” Janet said, climbing the ladder to the weather-beaten wooden judge’s chair in her perilously short skirt. “Who knows how we start?”

Starting, it emerged, involved picking a square and throwing a stone called the globe onto it. The stone was rough marble, bluish in color—it did look a little like a globe—and about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, though it was weirdly heavy. Quentin turned out to be unexpectedly talented at this feat, which was performed at various times during the game. The real trick was to avoid plunking it into a water square, in which case the game was forfeit, plus it was a pain to fish the globe out of the water.

Alice and Eliot were on the same team, facing off against Josh and Quentin, with Janet refereeing. Janet wasn’t the most assiduous student of the Physical Kids—that was Alice—or the most naturally gifted—Eliot—but she was ferally competitive, and she’d decided to acquire a total command of the technical intricacies of welters, which really was an amazingly complicated game.

“Without me you people would be lost!” Janet said, and it was true.

The game was half strategy, half spell-casting. You captured squares with magic, or protected them, or recaptured them by superseding an earlier spell. Water squares were the easiest, metal the hardest—they were reserved for summonings and other exotic enchantments. Eventually a player was supposed to step bodily onto the board, becoming in effect a playing piece in his or her own game, and as such vulnerable to direct, personal attacks. As he approached the edge the meadow around Quentin seemed to shrink, and the board expanded, as if it were at the center of a fisheye lens. The trees lost some of their color, becoming dim and silvery.

Things went quickly in the early rounds as both sides captured uncontested squares in a free-for-all land grab. As in chess, there were any number of conventional openings that had been worked out and optimized long ago. But once all the free squares were gone they had to start slugging it out head to head. The afternoon wore on, with long breaks for Janet’s highly technical welters tutorials. Eliot disappeared for twenty minutes and came back with six slender bottles of a very dry Finger Lakes Riesling he’d apparently been saving for just such an emergency, in two tin buckets full of melting ice. He hadn’t thought to bring any glasses, so they swigged straight from the bottles.

Quentin still didn’t have much of a capacity for alcohol, and the more wine he drank the less he could focus on the details of the game, which were getting hellishly complex. Apparently it was legal to transmute squares from one kind to another, and even make them slide around and switch places on the board somehow. By the time the players themselves had stepped onto the board, everybody was so drunk and confused that Janet had to tell them where to stand, which she did with towering condescension.

Not that anybody really cared. The sun drifted down behind the trees, dappling the grass with shadows, and the blue of the sky deepened to a luminous aqua. The air was bathwater warm. Josh fell asleep on the square he was supposed to be defending and sprawled across a whole row. Eliot did his impression of Janet, and Janet pretended to get mad. Alice took off her shoes and dabbled her feet in a temporarily uncontested water square. Their voices drifted up and got lost in the summer leaves. The wine was almost gone, the empty bottles bobbing around in the tin buckets, which were now full of lukewarm water in which a wasp had drowned.

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn’t. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so full of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind it a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again. Fogg’s idiotic welters plan had actually worked. The gray gloom the Beast had cast over the school was retreating. It was all right for them to be teenagers again, at least for a little longer. He felt forgiven, though he didn’t even know by whom.

Quentin imagined how they would all look from above. If somebody were to gaze down on them from a low-flying airplane, or a wandering dirigible, five people strewn around the neat little welters board on the grounds of their secret, exclusive magical enclave, their voices soft and unintelligible from a distance, how contented and complete in themselves that observer would believe them all to be. And it was actually true. The observer would be right. It was all real.

“Without me,” Janet said again, with fierce glee, blotting tears of laughter with the heel of her hand, “you people would be lost.”

Josh never knew what he would find. At one practice Quentin watched him go up against Eliot over one of the two metal squares on the board. These were made of a tarnished silvery stuff—one actually was silver, the other was palladium, whatever that was—with fine swirling lines and tiny italic words etched into them.

Eliot had chosen a fairly basic enchantment that created a small, softly glowing orb. Josh attempted a counterspell, muttering it half-heartedly while sketching a few cursory gestures with his large fingers. He always looked embarrassed when he cast spells, as if he never believed they were actually going to work.

But as he finished, the day went slightly faded and sepia toned, the way it might if a cloud drifted in front of the sun, or in the first moments of an eclipse.

“What the hell . . . ?” Janet said, squinting up at the sky.

Josh had successfully defended the square—he’d abolished Eliot’s will-o’-the-wisp—but he’d gone too far. Somehow he’d created its inverse, a black hole: he’d punched a drain hole in the afternoon, and the daylight was swirling into it. The five Physical Kids gathered around in the amber light to look, as if it were some unusual and possibly venomous beetle. Quentin had never seen anything quite like it. It was like some heavy-duty appliance had been turned on somewhere, sucking up the energy needed to light the world and causing a local brown-out.

Josh was the only one who didn’t seem bothered by this.

“How you like me now?” He did a victorious-chicken dance. “Huh? How do you like Josh now!”

“Wow,” Quentin said. He backed away a step. “Josh, what is that thing?”

“I don’t know, I just waved my little fingers—” He waggled his fingers in Eliot’s face. A soft breeze was kicking up.

“Okay, Josh,” Eliot said. “You got me. Shut it down.”

“Had enough? Is it too real for you, magic man?”

“Seriously, Josh,” Alice said. “Please get rid of that thing, it’s creeping us out.”

By now the whole field was plunged in deep twilight, even though it was only two in the afternoon. Quentin couldn’t look directly at the space above the metal square, but the air around it looked wavy and distorted, the grass behind it distant and smeared. Underneath it, in a perfect circle that could have been ruled by a compass, the blades of grass were standing up perfectly straight, like splinters of green glass. The vortex drifted lazily to one side, toward the edge of the board, and a nearby oak tree leaned toward it with a monstrous creaking sound.

“Josh, don’t be an idiot,” Eliot snapped. Josh had stopped celebrating. He watched his creation nervously.

The tree groaned and listed ominously. Roots popped underground like muffled rifle shots.

“Josh! Josh!” Janet shouted.

“All right already! All right!” Josh scrubbed out the spell, and the hole in space vanished.

He looked pale but regretful, resentful: they’d pissed on his parade. They stood silent in a half circle around the half-toppled oak. One of its longest branches almost touched the ground.

Bit by bit the summer atmosphere of balmy congeniality evaporated as the afternoons got colder and shorter and the demands of the game started to conflict with their already crushing academic workload. After a while welters became a chore just like anything else, except even more meaningless. As Quentin and the other Physical Kids became less enthusiastic, Janet got shriller and pushier about the game, and her shrill pushiness became less endearing. She couldn’t help it, it was just her neurotic need to control everything coming out to play, but that didn’t make it any less of a pain in the ass for the rest of them. Theoretically they could have gotten out of it by tanking a match—it would only have taken one—but they didn’t. Nobody quite had the heart, or the guts.

But Josh’s inconsistency continued to be a problem. On the morning of the final game of the season, he didn’t show up at all.

It was a Saturday morning in early November, and they were playing for the school championship—what Fogg had grandly christened the Brakebills Cup, although so far he hadn’t produced any actual physical vessel that answered to that name. The grass around the welters field was tricked out with two ranks of grimly festive wooden bleachers that looked like something out of old newsreel footage of college sporting events, and which had probably been lying disassembled in numbered sections in some unimaginably dusty storeroom for decades. There was even a VIP box occupied by Dean Fogg and Professor Van der Weghe, who clutched a coffee cup in her pink-mittened hands.

The sky was gray, and a heavy wind made the leaves seethe in the trees. The gonfalons (in Brakebills blue and brown) strung along the backs of the bleachers fluttered and snapped. The grass was crunchy with frozen dew.

“Where the hell is he?” Quentin jogged in place to keep warm.

“I don’t know! ” Janet had her arms around Eliot’s neck, clinging to him for warmth, which Eliot put up with irritably.

“Fuck him, let’s start,” he said. “I want to get this over with.”

“We can’t without Josh,” Alice said firmly.

“Who says we can’t?” Eliot tried to dislodge Janet, who clung to him relentlessly. “We’re better off without him anyway.”

“I’d rather lose with him,” Alice said, “than win without him. Anyway, he’s not dead. I saw him just after breakfast.”

“If he doesn’t show up soon, we’re all going to die of exposure. He’ll be the only one left alive to carry on our glorious fight.”

Josh’s absence made Quentin worried, about what he didn’t know.

“I’ll go find him,” Quentin said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s probably—”

At that moment the officiating faculty member, a hale, brick-colored man named Professor Foxtree, strode up to them wrapped in an ankle-length down parka. Students respected him instinctively because of his easy good humor and because he was tall and Native American.

“What’s the holdup?”

“We’re short a player, sir,” Janet told him. “Josh Hoberman is MIA.”

“So?” Professor Foxtree hugged himself vigorously. His long hooked nose had a drop on the end of it. “Let’s get this shit-show on the road, I’d like to be back in the senior common room by lunchtime. How many do you have?”

“Four, sir.”

“It’ll have to do.”

“Three, actually,” Quentin said. “Sorry, sir, but I have to find Josh. He should be here.”

He didn’t wait for an answer but set off back toward the House at a jog, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up around his ears to block out the cold.

“Come on, Q!” he heard Janet say. And then, disgustedly, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back: “Shit.”

Quentin didn’t know whether to be pissed off at Josh or worried about him, so he was both. Foxtree was right: it wasn’t like the game actually mattered. Maybe the bastard just overslept, he thought as he half-ran over the hard, frosted turf of the Sea. At least he had his fat to keep him warm. The fat bastard.

But Josh wasn’t in his bed. His room was a maelstrom of books and paper and laundry, as usual, some of it floating loosely in midair. Quen tin walked down to the sunroom, but its only occupant was the aged Professor Brzezinski, the potions expert, who sat at the window, eyes closed, drenched in sun, his white beard flowing down over a stained old apron. An enormous fly bounced against one of the windowpanes. He looked asleep, but when Quentin was almost out the door he spoke.

“Looking for someone?”

Quentin stopped. “Yes, sir. Josh Hoberman. He’s late for welters.”

“Hoberman. The fat one.”

The old man waved Quentin over with a blue-veined hand and fumbled a colored pencil and a piece of lined paper out of the pocket of his apron. With sure, rapid strokes Professor Brzezinski sketched a rough outline of the Brakebills campus. He muttered a few words in French and made a sign over it with one hand like a compass rose.

He held it up.

“What does this tell you?”

Quentin had expected magical special effects of some kind, but there was nothing. A corner of the map was stained from a coffee spill on the tray.

“Not a lot, sir.”

“Really?” The old man studied the paper for himself, looking puzzled. He smelled like ozone, shattered air, as if he had recently been struck by lightning. “But this really is a very good locator spell. Look again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s right. And where on campus does even a very good locator spell not work?”

“I have no idea.” Admitting ignorance promptly was the fastest way to get information out of a Brakebills professor.

“Try the library.” Professor Brzezinski closed his eyes again, like an old walrus settling back down onto a sunny rock. “There are so many old seek-and-finds on that room, you can’t find a Goddamned thing.”

Quentin had spent very little time in the Brakebills library. Hardly anybody did if they could help it. Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.

But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.

So the library was mostly empty, and it wasn’t hard to spot Josh in an alcove off the second floor, sitting at a small square table across from a tall, cadaverously thin man with chiseled cheekbones and a pencil mustache. The man wore a black suit that hung on him. He looked like an undertaker.

Quentin recognized the thin man: he was the magical bric-a-brac dealer who turned up once or twice a year at Brakebills in his woodie station wagon, loaded down with a bizarre collection of charms and fetishes and relics. Nobody particularly liked him, but the students tolerated him, if only because he was unintentionally funny and annoyed the faculty, who were always on the verge of banning him permanently. He wasn’t a magician himself and couldn’t tell the difference between what was genuine and what was junk, but he took himself and his stock extremely seriously. His name was Lovelady.

He’d turned up again shortly after the incident with the Beast, and some of the younger kids bought charms to protect themselves in the event of another attack. But Josh knew better than that. Or Quentin would have thought so.

“Hey,” Quentin said, but as he started toward them he knocked his forehead against a hard invisible barrier.

Whatever it was was cool and squeaked like clean glass. It was soundproof, too: he could see their lips moving, but the alcove was silent.

He caught Josh’s eye. There was a quick exchange with Lovelady, who peered over his shoulder at Quentin. Lovelady didn’t look happy, but he picked up what looked like an ordinary glass tumbler that had been standing upside-down on the table and flipped it over. The barrier vanished.

“Hey,” Josh said sullenly. “What’s up?” His eyes were red, and the bags under them were dark and bruised-looking. He didn’t look especially happy to see Quentin either.

“What’s going on?” Quentin ignored Lovelady. “You know we have a match this morning, right?”

“Oh, man. Right. Game time.” Josh smeared his right eye blearily with the heel of his hand. Lovelady watched them both, carefully husbanding his dignity. “How long do we have?”

“About negative half an hour.”

“Oh, man,” he said again. Josh put his forehead down on the table, then looked up suddenly at Lovelady. “Got anything for time travel? Time-turner or something?”

“Not at this time,” Lovelady intoned gravely. “But I will make inquiries.”

“Awesome.” Josh stood up. He saluted smartly. “Send me an owl.”

“Come on, they’re waiting for us. Fogg is freezing his ass off.”

“Good for him. Too much ass on that man anyway.”

Quentin got Josh out of the library and heading toward the rear of the House, though he was moving slowly and with a worrying tendency to lurch into door frames and occasionally into Quentin.

He did an abrupt about-face.

“Hang on,” he said. “Gotta get my quidditch costume. I mean uniform. I mean welters.”

“We don’t have uniforms.”

“I know that,” Josh snapped. “I’m drunk, I’m not delusional. I still need my winter coat.”

“Jesus, man. It’s not even ten o’clock.” Quentin couldn’t believe he’d been worried. This was the big mystery?

“Experiment. Thought it might relax me for the big game.”

“Yeah?” Quentin said. “Really? How’s that working out for you?”

“It was just a little Scotch, for Christ’s sake. My parents sent me a bottle of Lagavulin for my birthday. Eliot’s the lush around here, not me.” Josh looked up at him with his crafty, stubbly monk’s face. “Relax, I know what I can handle.”

“Yeah, you’re handling the hell out of it.”

“Oh, who gives a shit!” Josh was turning nasty. If Quentin was going to get mad, he would get madder. “You were probably hoping I wouldn’t show up and blow your precious game for you. I just wish you had the balls to admit it. God, you should hear Eliot do you behind your back. You’re as much of a cheerleader as Janet is. At least she has the tits for it.”

“If I wanted to win,” Quentin said coldly, “I would have left you in the library. Everybody else wanted to.”

He waited in the doorway, furious, arms folded, while Josh rifled through his clothes. He snatched his coat off the back of a desk chair, causing the chair to fall over. He let it lie there. Quentin wondered if it was true about Eliot. If Josh was trying to hurt him, he certainly knew where to stick the knife in.

They set off down the hall together in silence.

“All right,” Josh said finally. He sighed. “Look, you know how I’m kind of a fuck-up, right?”

Quentin said nothing, stone-faced. He didn’t feel like playing into Josh’s personal drama right now.

“Well, I am. And don’t bother with the self-esteem lecture, it’s gone so far beyond what you even want to know about. I’ve always been a smart guy, but I’m a low-grades/high-test-scores kind of smart guy. If it wasn’t for Fogg they would have kicked me out after last semester.”

“All right.”

“Look, all the rest of you can go around playing Peter Perfect, and that’s fine, but I have to work my ass off just to stay here! If you saw my grades—you guys don’t even know the alphabet goes that high.”

“We all have to work at it,” Quentin said a little defensively. “Well, except Eliot.”

“Yeah, okay, fine. But it’s fun for you. You get off on it. That’s your thing.” Josh shouldered his way through the French doors, out into the late-autumn morning, shrugging his way into his heavy overcoat at the same time. “Fuck, it’s cold. Look, I love it here, but I’m not going to make it on my own. I just don’t know where it comes from.”

With no warning he grabbed the front of Quentin’s coat and pushed him up against the wall of the House.

“Don’t you get it? I don’t know where it comes from! I do a spell, I don’t know if it’s going work or not!” His normally soft, placid face had worked itself into a mask of anger. “You look for the power, and it’s just there! Me, I never know! I never know if it’s going to be there when I need it. It comes and it goes and I don’t even know why!”

“Okay, okay.” Quentin put his hands on Josh’s shoulders, trying to calm him down. “Jesus. You’re hurting my man-boobs.”

Josh let go of him and stalked off in the direction of the Maze. Quentin caught up with him.

“So you thought Lovelady could help.”

“I thought he could . . . I don’t know.” Josh shrugged helplessly. “Give me a little boost. Just make it so I could count on it a little more.”

“By selling you some trash he got off eBay.”

“You know, he has interesting connections.” Just like that Josh was finding his good humor again. He always did. “They act all superior when we’re watching, but some of the faculty buy from Lovelady. I heard a couple of years ago Van der Weghe bought an old brass door knocker off him that turned out to be a Hand of Oberon. Chambers uses it to cut down trees around the Sea.

“I thought he could sell me a charm. Something to bring my grades up. I know I act like I don’t care, but I want to stay here, Quentin! I don’t want to go back out there!”

He pointed off in the general direction of the outside world. The grass was wet and half frozen, and the Sea was misty.

“I want you to stay, too,” Quentin said. His anger was going, too. “But Lovelady—Jesus, maybe you are an idiot. Why didn’t you just go to Eliot for help?”

“Eliot. He’s the last guy I’d talk to. Don’t you see how he looks at me in class? A guy like that—okay, he’s had it tough, in lots of ways, but this isn’t the kind of thing he understands.”

“What did Lovelady try to sell you?

“Bunch of old dust bunnies. Bastard told me they were Aleister Crow ley’s ashes.”

“What were you going to do with them anyway? Snort them?”

They pushed their way through the scrim of trees around the field. It was a grim scene. Eliot and Janet were huddled at one end of the board looking bedraggled and thoroughly chilled. Poor Alice was out on the board, squatting on a stone square and hugging herself miserably. The Natural Magic group was at the other end; despite the Physical Kids’ shortfall, they had chosen to field the full five players. Not very sportsmanlike. It was hard to see their faces—in an effort to intimidate their opponents they wore hooded druid robes that somebody had sewn together out of a bunch of green velvet curtains. They weren’t made to get wet.

The Physical Kids gave a ragged cheer when Josh and Quentin appeared.

“My heroes,” Janet said sarcastically. “Where did you find him?”

“Somewhere warm and dry,” Josh said.

They were being beaten badly, but Josh’s surprise reappearance revived their fighting spirit. On his first turn Josh went for the silver square, and after five solid minutes of Gregorianesque chanting he improbably brought into being a fiery elemental—a slow-moving, woodchuck-size salamander that looked like it was constructed out of glowing orange embers, and which went on to laconically capture two adjacent squares for good measure. It then settled down on its six legs to smolder and watch the rest of the match, raindrops sizzling and skating off its charred scales.

The Physical Kids’ comeback had the unfortunate effect of lengthening the game beyond all possibility of enjoyment. It was the longest game they’d played all season; it was shaping up to be the longest welters game anybody could remember. Finally after another hour the handsome, Scandinavian-looking captain of the Natural team—whom Quentin was pretty sure Janet used to date—toed the edge of the sand square he stood on, gathered his wet velvet robe around him regally, and caused an elegantly twisted little olive tree to curl up out of a grass square in the Physicals’ home row.

“Suck it!” he said.

“That’s the win,” Professor Foxtree called from the judge’s chair. He was visibly catatonic from boredom. “Unless you Physicals can match it. If not, then this damn game is finally over. Somebody throw the globe.”

“Come on, Q,” Eliot said. “My fingernails are blue. My lips are probably blue.”

“Your balls are probably blue,” Quentin said. He picked up the heavy marble from where it rested in a stone bowl by the edge of the board.

He looked around at the strange scene he stood at the center of. They were still in it—they’d been down, but they’d come almost all the way back, and he hardly ever missed with the globe. Mercifully there was no wind, but a mist was gathering, and it was getting hard to see the far end of the board. The afternoon was silent except for the dripping of the trees.

“Quentin!” a boy’s voice called hoarsely from the bleachers. “Quen-tin! ”

The Dean was still up in the VIP box, gamely miming enthusiasm. He blew his nose loudly into a silk handkerchief. The sun was a distant memory.

All at once a pleasant feeling of lightness and warmth came over Quentin—it was so vivid, and so divorced from the freezing cold reality all around him, that he wondered if somebody was doing some surreptitious magic on him; he looked suspiciously at the smoldering salamander, but it loftily ignored him. There was the familiar sense of the world narrowing to the limits of the board, trees and people shrinking and curving away around it, becoming silvery, solarized. Quentin’s view took in the miserable Josh, pacing by the edge of the board and taking deep breaths, and Janet, who was clenching her jaw and jutting it at him fiercely, hungrily, her arm through Eliot’s, whose eyes were fixed on some invisible scenery in the middle distance.

It all felt very far away. None of it mattered. That was the funny thing—it was incredible that he hadn’t seen it before. He would have to try and explain this to Josh. He had done a terrible, stupid thing in the classroom, the day Amanda Orloff had died, and he would never get over it, but he’d figured out how to live with it. You just had to get some idea of what matters and what doesn’t, and how much, and try not to be scared of the stuff that doesn’t. Put it in perspective. Something like that. Or otherwise what was the point? He didn’t know if he could explain it to Josh. But maybe he could show him.

Quentin took off his coat, as if he were sloughing off a scratchy, too-small skin. He rolled his shoulders in the cold air; he knew it would be freezing in a minute, but for the moment it was just refreshing. He sighted on the blond Natural player in his idiotic robe, leaned to one side, and slung the globe sidearm at his knee. It hit the heavy velvet with an audible thump.

“Ow!” The Natural grabbed his knee and looked up at Quentin with an outraged expression. That would bruise. “Foul!”

“Suck it,” Quentin said.

He whipped his shirt off over his head. Ignoring the rising yelps of dismay on all sides—it was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—he walked over to where Alice stood, dumbstruck, on her square. He would probably regret this later, but God it was good to be a magician sometimes. He hoisted her over his shoulder fireman-style and jumped with her into the freezing, cleansing water.