Now the first semester of Quentin’s Fourth Year was almost over, and he had acquired not one single new piece of information about what happened during that interval. The secret of where they went and what they did there, or what was done to them, was improbably well kept. Even students who took nothing else at Brakebills seriously were passionately serious on that one point: “Dude, I’m not even kidding, you so don’t want to be asking me about that . . .”

The disaster of the Beast had thrown off the previous year’s schedule. The regular contingent of Fourth Years had departed for the first semester—they were gone when it happened—but the second-semester group, which included Eliot, Janet, and Josh, had finished out the year at Brakebills as usual. To the extent that they speculated about it, they called themselves “the Spared.” Apparently whatever the faculty had in store for them was nasty enough as it was without the added threat of assault by an interdimensional carnivore.

But now it was back to business as usual. This year half the Fourth Years departed on schedule, along with a handful of the Fifth Years: the ten Spared had been split up between the two semesters, five and five. Whether by accident or by design, the Physical Kids would all be shipping out together in January.

It was a regular topic of conversation around the battered billiard table in the Cottage.

“You know what I bet?” Josh said, one Sunday afternoon in December. They were treating hangovers with glasses of Coke and huge quantities of bacon. “I bet they make us go to normal college. Just some random state school where we have to read Cannery Row and debate the Stamp Act. And like the second day Eliot’s going to be crying in the bathroom and begging for his foie gras and his malbec while some jock sodomizes him with a lacrosse stick.”

“Um, did that just turn into your total gay fantasy halfway through?” Janet asked.

“I have it on good authority”—Eliot attempted to jump the cue ball over the 8 and failed completely, pocketing both, which seemed not to bother him at all—“on the best of authority, that the whole Fourth Year enigma is a front. It’s all a hoax to scare off the faint of heart. You spend the whole semester on Fogg’s private island in the Maldives, contemplating the infini ties of the multiverse in grains of fine white beach sand while coolies bring you rum-and-tonics.”

“I don’t think they have ‘coolies’ in the Maldives,” Alice said quietly. “It’s been an independent republic since 1965.”

“So how come everybody comes back all skinny?” Quentin asked. Janet and Eliot were playing, the rest of them lay on two beat-up Victorian couches. The room was small enough that they occasionally had to lean to one side to avoid the butt end of a cue.

“That’s from all the skinny-dipping.”

“Hork hork hork,” said Janet.

“Quentin should be good at that,” Josh added.

“Your fat ass could use some skinny-dipping.”

“I don’t want to go,” Alice said. “Can’t I get a doctor’s note or something? Like when they let the Christian kids out of sex ed? Isn’t anybody else worried?”

“Oh, I’m terrified.” If he was joking, Eliot gave no sign of it. He handed Janet the cue ball. It was decorated with trompe-l’oeil lunar craters to look like the moon. “I’m not strong like the rest of you. I’m weak. I’m a delicate flower.”

“Don’t worry, delicate flower,” Janet said. She made her shot without dropping her gaze, no-look. “Suffering will make you strong.”

He knew it would happen at night—it was always at breakfast that they noticed that the Fourth Years were gone. It must have been two or three in the morning, but he woke up instantly when Professor Van der Weghe knocked on his door. He knew what was going on. The sound of her husky European voice in the darkness reminded him of his first night at Brakebills, when she’d put him to bed after his Examination.

“It’s time, Quentin,” she called. “We are going up to the roof. Do not bring anything.”

He stepped into his slippers. Outside a file of silent, rumpled Brakebills students stood on the stairs.

Nobody spoke as Professor Van der Weghe led them through a door in a stretch of wall that Quentin could have sworn had been blank the day before, between a pair of ten-foot-high oil paintings of clipper ships foundering in heavy seas. They shuffled up the dark wooden stairs without speaking, fifteen of them—ten Fourth Years, five leftover Fifth Years—everyone wearing identical navy blue Brakebills-issue pajamas. Despite Van der Weghe’s orders, Gretchen sullenly gripped a worn black teddy bear along with her cane. Up ahead of them Professor Van der Weghe banged open a wooden trapdoor, and they filed out onto the roof.

It was an awkward perch, a long, narrow, windy strip with a shingled drop falling away steeply on either side. A low wrought-iron fence ran along the edge, providing absolutely no protection or reassurance whatsoever; in fact it was the perfect height to take you out at the knees if you accidentally backed into it. The night was bitingly cold, with a lively cross-breeze. The sky was lightly frosted with high, wind-whisked clouds luridly backlit by a gibbous moon.

Quentin hugged himself. Still nobody had said a word; no one even looked at anybody else. It was like they were all still half asleep, and a single word would have shattered the delicate dream in which they walked. Even the other Physical Kids were like strangers.

“Everyone take off your pajamas,” Professor Van der Weghe called out.

Weirdly, they did. Everything was so surreal and trancelike already that it made perfect sense that they would all, guys and girls alike, get naked in front of each other in the freezing cold without a hint of self-consciousness. Afterward Quentin even remembered Alice putting a warm hand on his bare shoulder to steady herself as she stepped out of her pajama bottoms. Soon they were naked and shivering, their bare backs and buttocks pale in the moonlight, the starlit campus rolling away far below them, with the dark trees of the forest beyond.

Some of the students clutched their pajamas in both hands, but Professor Van der Weghe instructed them to drop them in a heap at their feet. Quentin’s blew away and disappeared over the ledge, but he didn’t try to stop them. It didn’t matter. She moved down the line, dabbing a generous gob of chalky white paste on each forehead and both shoulders with her thumb as she passed. When she was done, she walked back the other way, lining them up, checking her work, making sure they were standing up straight. Finally she called out a single harsh syllable.

Instantly a huge soft weight pressed down on Quentin, settling on his shoulders, bending him forward. He crouched down, straining against it. He tried to fight it, to lift it. It was crushing him! He bit back panic. It flashed through his brain—the Beast was back!—but this was different. As he doubled over he felt his knees folding up into his belly, merging with it. Why wasn’t Professor Van der Weghe helping them? Quentin’s neck was stretching and stretching out and forward, out of his control. It was grotesque, a horrible dream. He wanted to vomit but couldn’t. His toes were melting and flowing together, his fingers were elongating enormously and spreading out, and something soft and warm was bursting out of his arms and chest, covering him completely. His lips pouted grotesquely and hardened. The narrow strip of roof rose up to meet him.

And then the weight was gone. He squatted on the gray slate roof, breathing hard. At least he didn’t feel cold anymore. He looked at Alice, and Alice looked back at him. But it wasn’t Alice anymore. She had become a large gray goose, and so had he.

Professor Van der Weghe moved down the line again. With both hands she picked up each student in turn and threw him or her bodily off the roof. They all, in spite of the shock or because of it, reflexively spread out their wings and caught the air before they could be snared by the bare, grasping treetops below. One by one they sailed away into the night.

When it was his turn, Quentin honked in protest. Professor Van der Weghe’s human hands were hard and scary and burned against his feathers. He shat on her feet in panic. But then he was in the air and tumbling. He spread his wings and beat his way up into the sky, thrashing and punishing the air till it bore him up. It would have been impossible not to.

Quentin’s new goose-brain, it emerged, was not much given to reflection. His senses now tracked only a handful of key stimuli, but it tracked those very, very closely. This body was made for either sitting or flying, not much else, and as it happened Quentin was in a mood to fly. In fact, he felt like flying more than he had ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.

With no conscious thought or apparent effort, he and his classmates fell into the classic ragged V formation, with a Fourth Year named Georgia at the apex. Georgia was the daughter of the receptionist at a car dealership in Michigan, and she had come here against her family’s will—unlike Quen tin, she had confessed fully the nature of Brakebills, and as a reward for her honesty Georgia’s parents had tried to have her committed. Thanks to Fogg’s subtle spellcraft Georgia’s parents believed her to be attending a vocational institute for troubled adults. Now Georgia, whose Discipline was an obscure branch of Healing roughly analogous to endocrinology, and who wore her wiry black hair cinched at the back with a tortoiseshell barrette, was leading them southward, her brand-new wings pumping vigorously.

It was just chance; any one of them could have led the flock. Quentin was vaguely aware that, although he’d lost the lion’s share of his cognitive capacity in the transformation, he’d also picked up a couple of new senses. One had to do with air: he could perceive wind speed and direction and air temperature as clearly as whorls of smoke in a wind tunnel. The sky now appeared to him as a three-dimensional map of currents and eddies, friendly rising heat plumes and dense dangerous sinks of cool air. He could feel the prickle of distant cumulus clouds swapping bursts of positive and negative electrical charge. Quentin’s sense of direction had sharpened, too, to the point where it felt like he had a finely engineered compass floating in oil, perfectly balanced, at the center of his brain.

He could feel invisible tracks and rails extending away from him through the air in all directions into the blue distance. They were the Earth’s lines of magnetic force, and it was along one of these rails that Georgia was leading them. She was taking them south. By dawn they were a mile up and doing sixty miles an hour, overtaking cars on the Hudson Parkway below them.

They passed New York City, a stony encrustation crackling with alien heat and electrical sparks and exuding toxic flatulence. They flew all day, following the coastline, past Trenton and Philadelphia, sometimes over sea, sometimes over frozen fields, surfing the temperature gradients, boosted by updrafts, transferring seamlessly from current to current as one petered out and the next one kicked in. It felt fantastic. Quentin couldn’t imagine stopping. He couldn’t believe how strong he was, how many wing beats he had stored up in his iron chest muscles. He just couldn’t contain himself. He had to talk about it.

“Honk!” he yelled. “Honk honk honk honk honk honk honk! ”

His classmates agreed.

Quentin was shuffled up and down the V in an orderly fashion, in more or less the same way a volleyball team rotates serve. Sometimes they plonked down and rested and fed in a reservoir or a highway median or a badly drained spot on the lawn of a suburban office park (landscaping errors were pure gold to geese). Not infrequently they shared these priceless scraps of real estate with other V’s, real geese who, sensing their transformed nature, regarded them with polite amusement.

How long they flew, Quentin couldn’t have said. Once in a while he caught sight of a land formation he recognized, and he tried to calculate time and distance—if they flew at such and such a speed, and the Chesa peake Bay was so many miles south of New York City, then X number of days must have passed since . . . what again exactly? The X’s and blanks and other equationly such-and-such’s stubbornly refused to fill themselves in. They didn’t want to do their dance. Quentin’s goose-brain didn’t have the hardware to handle numbers, nor was it interested in whatever point those numbers were supposed to prove anyway.

They had gone far enough south now that the weather was perceptibly warmer, and then they went farther still. They went south over the Florida Keys, dry, crusty little nubbins barely poking their heads up out of the ceaselessly lapping turquoise, then out over the Caribbean, bypassing Cuba, farther south than any sensible goose had license to go. They overflew the Panama Canal, no doubt causing any bird-watchers who happened to spot them to shake their heads at the lost little V as they dutifully logged it in their bird journals.

Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew, or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. He forgot about his human past, about Brakebills and Brooklyn and James and Julia and Penny and Dean Fogg. Why hang on to them? He had no name anymore. He barely had any individual identity, and he didn’t want one. What good were such human artifacts? He was an animal. His job was to turn bugs and plants into muscle and fat and feathers and flight and miles logged. He served only his flock-fellows and the wind and the laws of Darwin. And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier.

Though it was tougher going now. They splashed down more rarely and in more exotic locales, widely spaced way stations that must have been picked out for them in advance. He’d be cruising along a mile and a half up, one eye monitoring the rocky ruff of the Andes, feeling his empty belly and the ache in his chest muscles, when something would twinkle in the forest a hundred miles down the line, and sure enough they’d happen upon a freshly flooded soccer field, or an abandoned swimming pool in some Shining Path warlord’s ruined villa, rainwater having diluted almost to nothing the lingering chemical tang of chlorine.

It was getting colder again, after their long tropical interlude. Peru gave way to Chile and the grassy, wind-ruffled Patagonian pampas. They were a lean flock now, their fat reserves depleted, but nobody turned aside or hesitated for a second as they plunged suicidally south from the tip of Cape Horn out over the terrifying blue chaos of Drake Passage. The invisible highway they rode would brook no swerving.

There was no playful intra-flock honking now. Quentin glanced over once at the other branch of the V to see Janet’s black button eye burning with furious determination opposite him. They overnighted on a miraculous barge adrift in deep water and loaded with good things, watercress and alfalfa and clover. When the bleak gray shore of Antarctica heaved up over the horizon, they regarded it not with relief but with collective resignation. This was no respite. There were no goose names for this country because geese didn’t come here, or if they did they never came back. He could see magnetic tracks and rails converging in the air here, carving in from far away on either side, like the longitude lines that come crowding together at the bottom of a globe. The Brakebills V flew high, the wrinkled gray swells telescopically clear below them through two miles of dry, salted air.

Instead of a beach a fringe of tumbled boulders crammed with bizarre, unintelligible penguins crept by, then blank white ice, the frozen skull of the Earth. Quentin was tired. The cold tore at his little body through its thin feathery jacket. He no longer knew what was keeping them aloft. If one of them dropped, he knew, they would all give up, just fold their wings and dive for the porcelain white snow, which would happily devour them.

And then the rail they followed dipped like a dowser’s rod. It angled them downward, and they slipped and slid gratefully down it, accepting a loss of altitude in exchange for speed and blessed relief from the effort of maintaining height with their burning wings. Quentin could see now that there was a stone house there in the snow, an anomaly in the otherwise featureless plain. It was a place of men, and ordinarily Quentin would have feared it, crapped on it, and then blown by it and forgotten it.

But no, there was no question, their track ended there. It buried itself in one of the stone house’s many snowy roofs. They were close enough now that Quentin could see a man standing on one of them, waiting for them, holding a long straight staff. The urge to fly from him was strong, but exhaustion and above all the magnetic logic of the track were stronger.

At the very last second he cupped his stiffened wings and they caught the air like a sail, snatching up the last of his kinetic energy and breaking his fall. He plopped onto the snow roof and lay there gasping at the thin atmosphere. His eyes went dull. The human hadn’t moved. Well, fuck him. He could do what he wanted with them, pluck them and gut them and stuff them and roast them, Quentin didn’t care anymore as long as he could just have one blessed moment of rest for his aching wings.

The man shaped a strange syllable with his fleshy, beakless lips and tapped the base of his staff on the roof. Fifteen pale, naked human teenagers lay in the snow under the white polar sun.

There was very little in the bedroom, and all of it was white: the bedclothes, the whitewashed walls, the coarse drawstring pajamas he wore, the white-painted iron bedstead, the slippers waiting for him on the cold stone floor. From the small square window Quentin could see he was on the second floor. His view was of broken snowfields beneath a white sky, stretching out to the horizon, a meaningless abstract white line an unjudgable distance away. My God. What had he gotten himself into?

Quentin shuffled out into the corridor, still in his pajamas and a thin robe he’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the door. He found his way downstairs into a quiet, airy hall with a timbered ceiling; it was identical to the dining hall at Brakebills, but the vibe was different, more like an Alpine ski lodge. A long table with benches ran most of the length of the hall.

Quentin sat down. A man sat alone at one end of the table, nursing a mug of coffee and staring bleakly at the picked-over remains of a lavish breakfast. He was sandy-haired, tall but round-shouldered, with a weak chin and the beginnings of a paunch. His dressing gown was much whiter and fluffier than Quentin’s. His eyes were a pale, watery green.

“I let you sleep,” he said. “Most of the others are already up.”

“Thanks.” Quentin scooched down the bench to sit across from him. He rummaged through the leftover plates and dishes for a clean fork.

“You are at Brakebills South.” The man’s voice was oddly flat, with a slight Russian accent, and he didn’t look directly at Quentin when he talked. “We are about five hundred miles from the South Pole. You flew in over the Bellingshausen Sea on your way in from Chile, over a region called Ellsworth Land. They call this part of Antarctica Marie Byrd Land. Admiral Byrd named it after his wife.”

He scratched his tousled hair unself-consciously.

“Where’s everybody else?” Quentin asked. There didn’t seem to be any point in being formal, since they were both wearing bathrobes. And the cold hash browns were unbelievably good. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.

“I gave them the morning.” He waved in no particular direction. “Classes begin in the afternoon.”

Quentin nodded, his mouth full.

“What kind of classes?” he managed.

“What kind of classes,” the man repeated. “Here at Brakebills South you will begin your education in magic. Or I suppose you thought that was what you were doing with Professor Fogg?”

Questions like that always confused Quentin, so he resorted to honesty.

“Yes, I did think that.”

“You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think”—his accent made it theenk—“that you have been studying magic.” Medzhik. “You have practiced your Popper and memorized your conjugations and declensions and modifications. What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?”

It popped out automatically. “Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water.”

“Very good,” he said sarcastically. “Magnificent. You are a genius.”

With an effort Quentin decided not to be stung by this. He was still enjoying the Zen afterglow of having been a goose. And the hash browns.

“Thank you.”

“You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare. You recite it like you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But you do not understand it.”

“I don’t?”

“To become a magician you must do something very different,” the man said. This was clearly his set piece. “You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you.

“When a magician casts a spell, he does not first mentally review the Major, Minor, Tertiary, and Quaternary Circumstances. He does not search his soul to determine the phase of the moon, and the nearest body of water, and the last time he wiped his ass. When he wishes to cast a spell he simply casts it. When he wishes to fly, he simply flies. When he wants the dishes done, they simply are.”

The man muttered something, tapped once resonantly on the table, and the dishes began noisily arranging themselves into stacks as if they were magnetized.

“You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your deek.” He grabbed his crotch through his dressing gown and gave it a shake. “We are going to submerge the language of spellcasting deep into who you are, so that you have it always, wherever you are, whenever you need it. Not just when you have studied for a test.

“You are not going on a mystical adventure here, Quentin. This process will be long and painful and humiliating and very, very”—he practically shouted the word—“boring. It is a task best performed in silence and isolation. That is the reason for your presence here. You will not enjoy the time you spend at Brakebills South. I do not encourage you to try.”

Quentin listened to this in silence. He didn’t especially like this man, who had just referred to his penis and whose name he still didn’t know. He put it out of his mind and focused on cramming starch into his depleted body.

“So how do I do that?” Quentin mumbled. “Learn things in my bones? Or whatever?”

“It is very hard. Not everybody does. Not everybody can.”

“Uh-huh. What happens if I can’t?”

“Nothing. You go back to Brakebills. You graduate. You spend your life as a second-rate magician. Many do. Probably you never realize it. Even the fact that you failed is beyond your ability to comprehend.”

Quentin had no intention of letting that happen to him, though it occurred to him that probably nobody actually set out to have that happen to them, and, statistically speaking, it had to happen to somebody. The hash browns no longer tasted quite so scrumptious. He put his fork down.

“Fogg tells me you are good with your hands,” the sandy-haired man said, relenting a little. “Show me.”

Quentin’s fingers were still stiff and sore from having served as wings, but he picked up a sharp knife that looked decently balanced, carefully cleaned it off with a napkin, and held it between the last two fingers in his left hand. He spun it, finger by finger, as far as his thumb, then he tossed it up almost to the ceiling—still spinning, careful to let it pass between two rafters—with the idea that it would fall and bury itself in the table between the third and fourth fingers of his outstretched left hand. This was best done without looking, maintaining eye contact with his audience for maximum effect.

Quentin’s breakfast companion picked up a loaf of bread and stuck it out so that the falling knife speared it. He tossed loaf and knife contemptuously on the table.

“You take stupid risks,” the man said stonily. “Go on and join your friends. I think”—theenk—“you will find them on the roof of the West Tower.” He pointed to a doorway. “We begin in the afternoon.”

Okay, Mr. Funnylaffs, Quentin thought. You’re the boss.

He stood up. The stranger stood up, too, and shuffled off in another direction. He had the air of a disappointed man.

As promised, the rest of the Brakebills group was up there, standing around dazed in threes and fours, staring out at the snowpack and talking in low tones, bathed in the eerie, even Antarctic light. They looked different. Their waists were trimmer, and their shoulders and chests were sturdier, huskier. They’d lost fat and packed on muscle during their flight south. Their jaws and cheekbones were sharply defined. Alice looked lovely and gaunt and lost.

“Honk honk honkonk honk honk! ” Janet said when she saw Quentin. People laughed, though Quentin had the impression she’d already made that joke a few times.

“Hey, man,” Josh said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Is this place fucked up or what?”

“Doesn’t seem so bad,” Quentin said. “What time is skinny-dipping?”

“I might have been a little off base with that,” Eliot said gloomily, also probably not for the first time. “We did all get naked, anyway.”

They were all wearing identical white pajamas. Quentin felt like an inmate in an insane asylum. He wondered if Eliot was missing his secret boyfriend of the moment, whoever it was.

“I ran into Nurse Ratched downstairs,” he said. The pajamas had no pockets, and Quentin kept looking for somewhere to put his hands. “He gave me a speech about how stupid I am and how miserable he’s going to make me.”

“You slept through our little meet’n’greet. That’s Professor Mayakovsky.”

“Mayakovsky. Like Dean Mayakovsky?”

“He’s the son,” Eliot said. “I always wondered what happened to him. Now we know.”

The original Mayakovsky had been the most powerful magician in a wave of international faculty brought in during the 1930s and 1940s. Until then Brakebills taught English and American magic almost exclusively, but in the 1930s a vogue for “multicultural” spellcasting had swept the school. Professors were imported at huge expense from around the world, the more remote the better: skirt-wearing shamans from Micronesian dot-islands; hunch-shouldered, hookah-puffing wizards from inner-city Cairo coffeehouses; blue-faced Tuareg necromancers from southern Morocco. Legend had it that Mayakovsky senior was recruited from a remote Siberian location, a cluster of frozen Soviet blockhouses where local shamanic traditions had hybridized with sophisticated Muscovite practices brought there by gulag inmates.

“I wonder how badly you have to fuck up to get this assignment,” Josh mused.

“Maybe he wanted it,” Quentin said. “Maybe he likes it here. Dude must be in creepy loner heaven.”

“I think you were right, I think I am going to be the first one to crack,” Eliot said, as if he were having a different conversation. He felt the fluffy stubble on his cheek. “I don’t like it here. This stuff is giving me a rash.” He fingered the material of the Brakebills South pajamas. “I think it might have a stain on it.”

Janet rubbed his arm comfortingly. “You’ll be okay. You survived Oregon. Is this worse than Oregon?”

“Maybe if I ask nicely he’ll turn me back into a goose.”

“Oh my God!” said Alice. “Never again. Do you realize we ate bugs? We ate bugs!”

“What do you mean, never again? How do you think we’re getting back?”

“You know what I liked about being a goose?” Josh said. “Being able to crap wherever I wanted.”

“I’m not going back.” Eliot threw a white pebble out into the white bleakness, where it became invisible before it hit the ground. “I could fly to Australia from here. Or New Zealand—the vineyards there are really coming along. Some nice sheep farmer will adopt me and feed me sauvignon blanc and turn my liver into a wonderful foie gras.”

“Maybe Professor Mayakovsky can turn you into a kiwi bird,” Josh said helpfully.

“Kiwi birds can’t fly.”

“Anyway, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s going to do us a lot of favors,” Alice said.

“He must spend a lot of time alone,” Quentin said. “I wonder if we should we feel bad for him.”

Janet snorted.

“Honk honk honk honk honk!”

That first morning they talked and mingled on the roof of the West Tower for what felt like hours, huddling together to cope with all the strangeness. Nobody felt like going back downstairs, even after they got tired of standing and ran out of things to talk about, so they all sat around the edge of the roof with their backs against the stone wall and just stared off into the pale, hazy distance, bathed in the weird, directionless, all-permeating white light reflecting off the snow.

Quentin leaned his back against the cool stone and closed his eyes. He felt Alice put her head on his shoulder. If nothing else, he could hang on to her. Whatever else changed, she was always the same. They rested.

Later, it might have been minutes or hours or days, he opened his eyes. He tried to say something and discovered that he couldn’t talk.

Some of the others were on their feet already. Professor Mayakovsky had appeared at the head of the stairs, his white bathrobe belted over his gut. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve taken the liberty of depriving you of the power of speech,” he said. He tapped his Adam’s apple. “There will be no talking at Brakebills South. It is the hardest thing to adjust to, and I find it eases the transition if I simply prevent you from speaking for your first weeks here. You may vocalize for the purposes of spellcasting, but for no other reason.”

The class stared at him mutely. Mayakovsky seemed to be more comfortable now that nobody could answer back.

“If you will all follow me downstairs, it is time for your first lesson.”

One thing had always confused Quentin about the magic he read about in books: it never seemed especially hard to do. There were lots of furrowed brows and thick books and long white beards and whatnot, but when it came right down to it, you memorized the incantation—or you just read it off the page, if that was too much trouble—you collected the herbs, waved the wand, rubbed the lamp, mixed the potion, said the words—and just like that the forces of the beyond did your bidding. It was like making salad dressing or driving stick or assembling Ikea furniture—just another skill you could learn. It took some time and effort, but compared to doing calculus, say, or playing the oboe—well, there really was no comparison. Any idiot could do magic.

Quentin had been perversely relieved when he learned that there was more to it than that. Talent was part of it—that silent, invisible exertion he felt in his chest every time a spell came out right. But there was also work, hard work, mountains of it. Every spell had to be adjusted and modified in a hundred ways according to the prevailing Circumstances—they adorned the word with a capital letter at Brakebills—under which it was cast. These Circumstances could be just about anything: magic was a complicated, fiddly instrument that had to be calibrated precisely to the context in which it operated. Quentin had committed to memory dozens of pages of closely printed charts and diagrams spelling out the Major Circumstances and how they affected any given enchantment. And then, once you had all that down, there were hundreds of Corollaries and Exceptions to memorize too.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Tal mudic commentary.

It was Mayakovsky’s intention to make them memorize all these minutiae, and not only to memorize them but to absorb and internalize them. The very best spellcasters had talent, he told his captive, silent audience, but they also had unusual under-the-hood mental machinery, the delicate but powerful correlating and cross-checking engines necessary to access and manipulate and manage this vast body of information.

That first afternoon Quentin expected a lecture, but instead, when Mayakovsky was done jinxing their larynxes, he showed each of them to what looked like a monk’s cell, a small stone room with a single high, barred window, a single chair, and a single square wooden table. A shelf of magical reference books was bolted to one wall. It had the clean, industrious air of a room that had just been vigorously swept with a birch-twig broom.

“Sit,” Mayakovsky said.

Quentin sat. The professor placed in front of him, one by one, like a man setting up a chessboard, a hammer, a block of wood, a box of nails, a sheet of paper, and a small book bound in pale vellum.

Mayakovsky tapped the paper.

“Hammer Charm of Legrand,” he said. “You know it?”

Everybody knew it. It was a standard teaching charm. While simple in theory—all it did was ensure that a hammered nail would go in straight, in one shot—it was extraordinarily persnickety to cast. It existed in literally thousands of permutations, depending on the Circumstances. Casting Legrand was probably harder than just hammering the damn nail in the old-fashioned way, but it came in handy for didactic purposes.

Mayakovsky tapped the book with a thick-nailed finger.

“This book, each page describes a different set of Circumstances. All different. Understand? Place, weather, stars, season—you will see. You turn the page, you cast the spell according to each set of Circumstances. Good practice. I’ll come back when you finish book. Khorosho? ”

Mayakovsky’s Russian accent was getting thicker as the day wore on. He was dropping his contractions and definite articles. He closed the door behind him. Quentin opened the book. Somebody not very creative had written ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE on the first page. Something told Quentin that Mayakovsky had noticed the graffiti but let it stand.

Soon Quentin knew Legrand’s Hammer Charm better than he wanted to know any spell ever. Page by page the Circumstances listed in the book became more and more esoteric and counterfactual. He cast Legrand’s Hammer Charm at noon and at midnight, in summer and winter, on mountaintops and a thousand yards beneath the earth’s surface. He cast the spell underwater and on the surface of the moon. He cast it in early evening during a blizzard on a beach on the island of Mangareva, which would almost certainly never happen since Mangareva is part of French Polynesia, in the South Pacific. He cast the spell as a man, as a woman, and once—was this really relevant?—as a hermaphrodite. He cast it in anger, with ambivalence, and with bitter regret.

By then Quentin’s mouth was dry. His fingertips were numb. He had pounded his thumb with the hammer four times. The block of wood was now crammed with flattened iron nail heads. Quentin groaned soundlessly and let his head loll back against the hard back of the chair. The door flew open, and Professor Mayakovsky entered carrying a jingling tray.

He set the tray down on the desk. It supported a cup of hot tea, a tumbler of water, a plate with a pat of yeasty European butter and a thick slab of sourdough bread on it, and a glass containing what would turn out to be two fingers of peppery vodka, one finger of which Mayakovsky drank off himself before placing it on the table.

When he was done he slapped Quentin hard across the face.

“That is for doubting yourself,” he said.

Quentin stared at him. He lifted a hand to his cheek, thinking: This man is batshit insane. He could do anything to us out here.

Mayakovsky turned the book back to the first page again. He turned the piece of paper with the spell on it over and patted it. On the back was written another spell: Bujold’s Sorcerous Nail Extraction.

“Begin again, please.”

Wax on, wax off.

When Mayakovsky was gone, Quentin stood up and stretched. Both his knees cracked. Instead of beginning again he went over to the tiny window looking out on the lunar snowfields. The sheer monochromaticity of the landscape was beginning to make him hallucinate colors. The sun had not moved at all.

And he understood why they’d been sent here. What Mayakovsky was asking of them was impossible. The human brain was not meant to ingest these quantities of information. If Fogg had tried to enforce this regimen back at Brakebills, there would have been an insurrection.

It was difficult to gauge how the others were holding up. They met at mealtimes and passed in the hall, but because of the prohibition against speech there was no commiserating, just glances and shrugs and not much of that. Their gazes met bleakly over the breakfast table and turned away. Eliot’s eyes were empty, and Quentin supposed his own probably looked the same way. Even Janet’s animated features were set and frozen. No notes were exchanged. Whatever enchantment kept them from talking was global: their pens wouldn’t write.

Quentin was losing interest in communicating anyway. He should have been ravenous for human contact, but instead he felt himself falling away from the others, deeper inside himself. He shuffled like a prisoner from bedroom to dining room to solitary classroom, down the stone corridors, under the tediously unblinking gaze of the white sun. Once he wandered up to the roof of the West Tower and found one of the others, a gangly extrovert named Dale, putting on a mime show for a listless audience, but it really wasn’t worth the effort of turning his head to follow what was going on. His sense of humor had died in the vastness.

Professor Mayakovsky seemed to expect this, as if he’d known it was going to happen. After the first three weeks he announced that he had lifted the spell that kept them from talking. The news was received in silence. Nobody had noticed.

Mayakovsky began to vary the routine. Most days were still devoted to grinding through the Circumstances and their never-ending Exceptions, but once in a while he introduced other exercises. In an empty hall he erected a three-dimensional maze composed of wire rings through which the students would levitate objects at speed, to sharpen their powers of concentration and control. At first they used marbles, then later steel balls only slightly narrower than the rings. When a ball brushed a ring a spark cracked between them, and the spellcaster felt a shock.

Later still they would guide fireflies through the same maze, influencing their tiny insect minds by force of will. They watched one another do this in silence, feeling envy at one another’s successes and contempt for one another’s failures. The regime had divided them against each other. Janet in particular was bad at it—she tended to overpower her fireflies, to the point where they would crisp up in midair and become puffs of ash. Mayakovsky, stony-faced, just made her start over, while tears of wordless frustration ran down her face. This could and did go on for hours. No one could leave the hall before everyone had completed the exercise. They slept there more than once.

As the weeks went by, and still no one spoke, they plowed deeper and deeper into areas of magic Quentin never thought he’d have the guts to try. They practiced transformations. He learned to unpack and parse the spell that had turned them into geese (much of the trick, it turned out, was in shedding, storing, and then restoring the difference in body mass). They spent a hilarious afternoon as polar bears, wandering clumsily in a herd over the packed snow, swatting harmlessly at each other with giant yellow paws, encased as they were in layers of fur, hide, and fat. Their bear bodies felt clumsy and top heavy, and they kept toppling over sideways onto their backs by accident. More hilarity.

Nobody liked him, but it became apparent that Mayakovsky was no fraud. He could do things Quentin had never seen done at Brakebills, things he didn’t think had been done for centuries. One afternoon he demonstrated, but did not allow them to try, a spell that reversed the flow of entropy. He smashed a glass globe and then neatly restored it again, like a film clip run in reverse. He popped a helium balloon and then knitted it back together and refilled it with its original helium atoms, in some cases fishing them from deep inside the lungs of spectators who had inhaled them. He used camphor to smother a spider—he showed no particular remorse about this—and then, frowning with the effort, brought the spider back to life. Quentin watched the poor thing creep around in circles on the tabletop, hopelessly traumatized, making little dazed rushes at nothing and then retreating to a corner, hunched up and twitching, while Mayakovsky moved on to another topic.

One day, about three months into the semester, Mayakovsky announced that they would be transforming into Arctic foxes for the afternoon. It was an odd choice—they’d already done a few mammals, and it was no tougher than becoming a goose. But why quibble? Being an Arctic fox turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun. As soon as the change was in effect Quentin shot out across the snowpack on his four twinkling paws. His little fox body was so fast and light, and his eyes were so close to the ground, that it was like flying a high-performance jet at low altitude. Tiny ridges and crumbs of snow loomed up like mountains and boulders. He leaped over them and dodged around them and crashed through them. When he tried to turn he was going so fast he skidded and wiped out in a huge plume of snow. The rest of the pack gleefully piled on top of him, yipping and yapping and snapping.

It was an amazing outpouring of collective joy. Quentin had forgotten he was capable of that emotion, the way a lost spelunker feels like there never was such a thing as sunlight, that it was just a cruel fiction. They chased one another around in circles, panting and rolling and acting like idiots. It was funny, Quentin thought, with his stupid little miniature fox brain, the way he could automatically recognize everybody as foxes. That was Eliot with the snaggle-teeth. That plump blue-white critter was Josh. That small, silky specimen with the wide eyes was Alice.

Somewhere in the goofing off a game spontaneously evolved. It had something to do with pushing around a chunk of ice with your paws and your nose as fast as possible. Beyond that the point of the game wasn’t really clear, but they frantically pounced on the chunk of ice, or pounced on whoever had pounced on it just before them, and pushed it until the next person pounced on them.

An Arctic fox’s eyes weren’t all that much to brag about, but its nose was unbelievable. Quentin’s new nose was a Goddamned sensory masterpiece. Even in the middle of the fray he could recognize classmates by snuffing their fur. Increasingly, Quentin noticed one scent more than the others. It was a sharp, acrid, skunky musk that probably would have smelled like cat piss to a human being, but to a fox it was like a drug. He caught flashes of it in the fray every few minutes, and every time he did it grabbed his attention and jerked him around like a fish on a hook.

Something was happening to the game. It was losing its cohesion. Quen tin was still playing, but fewer and fewer of his fellow foxes were playing with him. Eliot lit out in a streak off into the snow dunes. The pack dwindled to ten, then eight. Where were they going? Quentin’s fox brain barked. And what the hell was that unbe-fucking-lievable smell he kept stumbling on? There it was again! This time he tackled the source of the smell, buried his snuffling muzzle in her fur, because of course he had known all along, with what was left of his consciousness, that what he was smelling was Alice.

It was totally against the rules, but breaking the rules turned out to be as much fun as obeying them. How had he never figured that out before? The others were playing more and more wildly—they weren’t even trying to go after the chunk of ice anymore—and the game was disintegrating into little knots of tussling foxes, and he was tussling with Alice. Vulpine hormones and instincts were powering up, taking over, manhandling what was left of his rational human mind.

He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn’t seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. Something crazy and urgent was going on, and there was no way to stop it, or probably there was but why would you? Stopping was one of those pointless, life-defeating human impulses for which his merry little fox brain had nothing but contempt.

He caught a glimpse of Alice’s wild dark fox’s eye rolling with terror and then half shutting with pleasure. Their tiny quick breaths puffed white in the air and mingled and disappeared. Her white fox fur was coarse and smooth at the same time, and she made little yipping snarls every time he pushed himself deeper inside her. He never wanted to stop.

The snow burned underneath them. It glowed hot like a bed of coals. They were on fire, and they let the fire consume them.

She was sitting across the table and three people down from him, impassive and unperturbed, calmly focused on her oatmeal. He couldn’t have guessed within a light-year what she was thinking. Though he knew what was on everybody else’s minds. He was sure they all knew what had happened. They’d been right out in the open, for God’s sake. Or had they all been doing the same thing? Did everybody pair off? His face felt hot. He didn’t even know if she was a virgin. Or, if she had been whether she still was one.

It would all be so much simpler if he even understood what it meant, but he didn’t. Could he be in love with Alice? He tried to compare what he felt for her with his remembered feelings for Julia, but the two emotions were worlds apart. Things just got out of control, that’s all. It wasn’t them, it was their fox bodies. Nobody had to take it too seriously.

Mayakovsky sat at the head of the table looking smug. He had known this was going to happen, Quentin thought furiously, stabbing at his cheese grits with a fork. A bunch of teenagers cooped up in the Fortress of Solitude for two months, then stuck in the bodies of stupid horny animals. Of course we were going to go crazy.

Whatever perverted personal satisfaction Mayakovsky got out of what happened, it became obvious over the next week that it was also a practical piece of personnel management, because Quentin reapplied himself to his magical studies with the laserlike focus of a person desperate to avoid meeting anybody else’s eyes or thinking about things that actually mattered, like how he really felt about Alice, and who it was who had had sex with her out on the ice, him or the fox. It was back to the grind, pounding his way through Circumstances and Exceptions and a thousand mnemonics designed to force him to embed a thousand trivial particles of data in the soft tissue of his already supersaturated mind.

They fell into a collective tribal trance. The depleted palette of the Antarctic world hypnotized them. The shifting snows outside briefly revealed a low ridge of dark shale, the only topographical feature in a featureless world, and the students watched it from the roof like television. It reminded him of the desert in The Wandering Dune—God, he hadn’t thought about Fillory for ages. Quentin wondered if the rest of the world, his life before this, had just been a lurid dream. When he pictured the globe now it was entirely Antarctic, a whole world over which this monochromatic continent had metastasized like an icy cancer.

He went a little insane. They all did, though it took them in different ways. Some of the others became obsessed with sex. Their higher functions were so numb and exhausted they became animals, desperate for any kind of contact that wouldn’t ask words of them. Impromptu orgies were not unheard of. Quentin came upon them once or twice in the evenings—they would gather in apparently arbitrary combinations, in an empty classroom or in somebody’s bedroom, in semi-anonymous chains, their white uniforms half or all the way off, their eyes glassy and bored as they pulled and stroked and pumped, always in silence. He saw Janet take part once. The display was as much for other people as for themselves, but Quentin never joined in or even watched, just turned away, feeling superior and also strangely angry. Maybe he was just angry that something kept him from jumping in. He was disproportionately relieved that he never saw Alice there.

Time passed, or at least Quentin knew that, according to theory, it pretty much had to be passing, though he didn’t personally see much evidence of it, unless you counted the weird menagerie of mustaches and beards he and his male classmates were growing. However much he ate he got thinner and thinner. His state of mind devolved from mesmerized to hallucinatory. Tiny random things became charged with overwhelming significance—a round pebble, a stray straw from a broom, a dark mark on a white wall—that dissipated again minutes later. In the classroom he sometimes saw fantastical creatures mixed in with his classmates—a huge, elegant brown stick insect that clung to the back of a chair; a giant lizard with horny skin and a German accent, whose head burned with white fire—though afterward he could never be sure if he had imagined them. Once he thought he saw the man whose face was hidden by a branch. He couldn’t take this much longer.

Then, just like that, one morning over breakfast Mayakovsky announced that there were two weeks remaining in the semester, and it was time they gave serious thought to the final exam. The test was simply this: they would walk from Brakebills South to the South Pole. The distance was on the order of five hundred miles. They would be given no food and no maps and no clothing. They would have to protect and sustain themselves by magic. Flying was out of bounds—they would go on foot or not at all, and in the form of human beings, not as bears or penguins or some other naturally cold-resistant animal. Cooperation between students was prohibited—they could view it as a race, if they liked. There was no time limit. The exam was not mandatory.

Two weeks wasn’t quite long enough to prepare properly, but it was more than long enough for the decision to hang over them. Yes or no, in or out? Mayakovsky stressed that safety precautions would be minimal. He would do his best to keep track of them in the field, but there was no guarantee that if they screwed up he’d be able to rescue their sorry, hypothermic asses.

There was a lot to study up on. Would sunburn be a problem? Snow blindness? Should they toughen the soles of their feet or try to create some kind of magical footwear? Was there any way to get mutton fat, which they could need to cast Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth, from the kitchen? And if the test wasn’t even mandatory, then what was the point of it? What would happen if they failed? It sounded more like a ritual or a hazing than a final exam.

Most of the cupboards were locked—he probably wasn’t the first student to have thought of it—but he did manage to load up his pockets with flour and a stray silver fork and some old sprouting garlic cloves that might come in handy for something, he didn’t know what. He headed downstairs.

Alice was waiting for him on the landing between floors.

“I have to ask you something,” she said, her voice full of crisp determination. “Are you in love with me? It’s okay if you aren’t, I just want to know.”

She made it almost all the way through, but she couldn’t quite say the last phrase full voice and whispered it instead.

He hadn’t even met her eyes since the afternoon they’d been foxes together. Three weeks at least. Now they stood together on the smooth, freezing stone floor, abjectly human. How could a person who hadn’t washed or cut her hair in five months be so beautiful?

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was scratchy from lack of use. The words felt more frightening than any spell he had ever cast. “I mean, you’d think I would, but I don’t. I really don’t know.”

He tried to make his tone light and conversational, but his body felt heavy. The floor was accelerating rapidly upward with both of them on it. At that moment, when he should have been most lucidly present, he had no idea whether he was lying or telling the truth. With all the time he’d spent studying here, everything he’d learned, why hadn’t he learned this one thing? He was failing both of them, himself and Alice.

“It’s okay,” she said, with a quick little smile that strained the ligaments that held Quentin’s heart in his chest. “I didn’t think so. I was more wondering whether you would lie about it.”

He was lost. “Was I supposed to lie?”

“It’s okay, Quentin. It was nice. The sex, I mean. You do realize it’s all right to have nice things sometimes, right?”

She saved him from having to answer by standing up on tiptoe and kissing him softly on the lips. Her lips were dry and chapped, but the tip of her tongue was soft and warm. It felt like the last warm thing in the world.

“Try not to die,” she said.

She patted his rough cheek and disappeared down the stairs ahead of him in the predawn twilight.

“Happy trails,” Mayakovsky called. He tossed Quentin a Ziploc bag full of something gray and greasy. Mutton fat. “Bog s’vami.”

Whatever. Quentin knew he had only a few seconds before his fingers would be too numb for spellcasting. He tore open the bag and jammed his hands inside and stuttered out Chkhartishvili’s Enveloping Warmth. It got easier after that. He layered on the rest of the spells by turns: protection from the wind and the sun, speed, strong legs, toughened feet. He threw up a navigation spell, and a great luminous golden compass wheel that only he could see appeared overhead in the white sky.

Quentin knew the theory behind the spells, but he’d never tested them all together at full strength. He felt like a superhero. He felt bionic. He was in business.

He turned to face the S on the compass wheel and trotted off toward the horizon at speed, circling around the building he’d just left, bare feet fluffing silently through bone-dry powder. With the strength spells in place his thighs felt like pneumatic pistons. His calves were steel truck springs. His feet were as tough and numb as Kevlar brake shoes.

Afterward he remembered almost nothing of the week that followed. The whole thing was very clinical. Reduced to its technical essence, it was a problem of resource management, of nurturing and guarding and fanning the little flickering flame of life and consciousness within his body as the entire continent of Antarctica tried to leach away the heat and sugar and water that kept it burning.

He slept lightly and very little. His urine turned a deep amber then ceased to flow entirely. The monotony of the scenery was relentless. Each low crunchy ridge he topped revealed a vista composed of its identical clones, arranged in a pattern of infinite regress. His thoughts went around in circles. He lost track of time. He sang the Oscar Mayer jingle and the Simpsons theme song. He talked to James and Julia. Sometimes he confused James with Martin Chatwin and Julia with Jane. The fat melted out of his body; his ribs grew more prominent, tried to push their way out through his skin. He had to be careful. His margin of error was not large. The spells he was using were powerful and highly durable, with a life of their own. He could die out here, and his corpse would probably keep jogging merrily along toward the pole on its own.

Once or twice a day, sometimes more, a lipless blue crevasse would open beneath his feet, and he would have to trot around it or cross it with a magic-assisted leap. Once he stumbled right into one and fell forty feet down into blue-tinted darkness. The ward-and-shield spells around his pale, nude body were so thick that he barely noticed. He just ground to a slow stop, jammed in between two rough ice walls, and then lifted himself back out again, like the Lorax, and kept on running.

Even as his physical strength faded he leaned on the iron magical vigor that his sojourn under Professor Mayakovsky had given him. It no longer felt like a fluke when he worked magic successfully. The worlds of magical and physical reality felt equally real and present to him. He summoned simple spells into being without conscious thought. He reached for the magical force within him as naturally as he would reach for the salt on the dinner table. He had even gained the ability to extemporize a little, to guess at magical Circumstances when he hadn’t been drilled on them. The implications of this were stunning: magic wasn’t simply random, it had an actual shape—a fractal, chaotic shape, but subconsciously his blindly groping mental fingertips had begun to parse it.

He remembered a lecture Mayakovsky had given a few weeks before, which at the time he hadn’t paid much attention to. Now, however, jogging forever south across the frozen, broken plains, it came back to him almost word for word.

“You dislike me,” Mayakovsky had begun. “You are sick of the sight of me, skraelings.” That was what he called them, skraelings. Apparently it was a Viking word that meant, roughly, “wretches.”

“But if you listen to me only one more time in your lives, listen to me now. Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely. Not all of you—Dale, I think you in particular are unlikely to cross that Rubicon. But for some of you spells will one day come very easily, almost automatically, with very little in the way of conscious effort.

“When the change comes, I ask only that you know it for what it is, and be aware. For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire something, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a madman in that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place. And you will find out very quickly whether or not you have that clarity and that strength.”

Mayakovsky stared out at their silent faces a moment longer, with undisguised disgust, then stepped down from the lectern. “Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”

When night finally fell the stars burned shrilly overhead with impossible force and beauty. Quentin jogged with his head up, knees high, no longer feeling anything below his waist, gloriously isolated, lost in the spectacle. He became nothing, a running wraith, a wisp of warm flesh in a silent universe of midnight frost.

Once, for a few minutes, the darkness was disturbed by a flickering on the horizon. He realized it must be another student, another skraeling like himself, moving on a parallel path but way off to the east, twenty or thirty miles at least, and ahead of him. He thought about changing course to make contact. But seriously, what was the point? Should he risk getting busted for collaborating, just to say hi? What did he, a wraith, a wisp of warm flesh, need with anybody else?

Whoever it was, he thought dispassionately, was using a different set of spells than he was. He couldn’t piece out the magic at this distance, but they were throwing off a whole lot of pale pink-white light.

Inefficient, he thought. Inelegant.

When the sun rose he lost sight of the other student again.

The landscape had, if anything, gotten more monotonous. Far behind him were the moments when streaks of dark frozen schist occasionally marred the white snow. Once he’d passed what he was fairly sure was a fallen meteorite stuck in the ice, a lump of something black, like a lost charcoal briquette. But that was a long time ago.

He was far gone. After days without real sleep his mind was a machine for monitoring spells and moving his feet, nothing else. But while he was checking off anomalies, there was something screwy going on with his compass wheel, too. It wobbled erratically, and it was getting kind of distorted. The N had grown vast and swollen; it was taking up five-sixths of the circle, and the other directions had withered away to almost nothing. The She was supposed to be following had shrunk to a tiny squiggle in microscopic jewel type.

The black spot was taller than it was wide, and it bobbed up and down with his stride the way an external object would. So it wasn’t corneal damage. And it was growing larger and larger, too. It was Mayakovsky, stand ing by himself in the powdery nothingness, holding a blanket. He must be at the pole. Quentin had completely forgotten where he was going or why.

When he got close enough Mayakovsky caught him. The tall man grunted, wrapping the heavy, scratchy blanket around him, and swung him down to the snow. Quentin’s legs kept moving for a few seconds, then he lay still, panting, on his side, twitching like a netted fish. It was the first time in nine days that he’d stopped running. The sky spun. He retched.

Mayakovsky stood over him.

“Molodyetz, Quentin. Good man. Good man. You made it. You are going home.”

There was something odd in Mayakovsky’s voice. The sneer was gone, and it was thick with emotion. A twisted smile revealed for a moment the older wizard’s yellow teeth in his unshaven face. He hauled Quentin to his feet with one hand; the other hand he flourished, and a portal appeared in the air. He shoved Quentin unceremoniously through it.

Quentin staggered and fell into a psychedelic riot of green that assaulted him so violently that at first he didn’t recognize it as the rear terrace of Brakebills on a hot summer day. After the blankness of the polar ice the campus was a hallucinatory swirl of sound and color and warmth. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. He was home.

He rolled over on his back on the baking smooth stone. Birds sang deafeningly. He opened his eyes. A sight even stranger than the trees and the grass met them: looking back through the portal, he could still see the tall, soft-shouldered magician standing there with Antarctica in the background. Snow kicked up around him. A few stray crystals drifted through and evaporated in midflight. It looked like a painting executed on an oval panel and hung in midair. But the magical window was already closing. He must be preparing himself to go back to his empty polar mansion, Quentin thought. He waved, but Mayakovsky wasn’t looking at him. He was looking out at the Maze and the rest of the Brakebills campus. The unguarded longing on his face was so excruciating Quentin had to look away.

Then the portal closed. It was over. It was late May, and the air was full of pollen. After the rarefied atmosphere of Antarctica it tasted hot and thick as soup. It was a lot like that first day he’d come to Brakebills, straight through from that frigid Brooklyn afternoon. The sun beat down. He sneezed.

They were all waiting for him, or almost all: Eliot and Josh and Janet, at least, wearing their old school uniforms, looking fat and happy and relaxed and none the worse for wear, like they’d done nothing for the past six months but sit on their asses and eat grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Welcome back,” Eliot said. He was munching a yellow pear. “They only told us ten minutes ago you might be coming through.”

“Wow.” Josh’s eyes were round. “Man, you look skinny. Wizard needs food badly. And also maybe a shower.”

Quentin knew he had only a minute or two before he burst into tears and passed out. He still had Mayakovsky’s scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him. He looked down at his pale, frozen feet. Nothing looked frostbitten, anyway, though one of his toes was sticking out at an angle. It didn’t hurt yet.

It was very, very comfortable, deliriously comfortable, lying on his back on the hot stone like this, with the others looking down at him. He knew he should probably get up, for the sake of politeness if for no other reason, but he didn’t feel like moving yet. He thought he might just stay where he was for another minute. He had earned himself a rest.

“Are you all right?” Josh said. “What was it like?”

“Alice kicked your ass,” Janet said. “She got back two days ago. She already went home.”

“You were out there a week and a half,” Eliot said. “We were worried about you.”

Why did they keep talking? If he could just gaze up at them in silence, that would be perfect. Just look at them and listen to the chirping birds and feel the warm flagstones holding him up. And maybe somebody could get him a glass of water, he was desperately thirsty. He tried to articulate this last sentiment, but his throat was dry and cracked. He wound up just making a tiny creaking noise.

“Oh, I think he wants to know about us,” Janet said. She took a bite of Eliot’s pear. “Yeah, nobody else went out but you two. What—you think we’re stupid?”