The Magicians - Lev Grossman [31]
His tutor was Professor Sunderland, the pretty young woman who had asked him to draw maps during his Examination. She looked nothing like a magician was supposed to: she was blond and dimply and distractingly curvy. Professor Sunderland taught mostly upper-level courses, Fourth and Fifth Years, and didn’t have much patience for amateurs. She drilled him relentlessly on gestures and incantations and charts and tables, and when he was perfect, that was a start, but she’d like to see Popper etudes No. 7 and No. 13 again, please, slowly, forward and then backward, just to make sure. Her hands did things Quentin couldn’t imagine his hands ever doing. It would have been intolerable if Quentin didn’t have a ferocious crush on Professor Sunderland.
He almost felt like he was betraying Julia. But what did he owe her? It’s not like she even would have cared. And Professor Sunderland was here. He wanted somebody who was part of his new world. Julia had her chance.
Quentin spent a lot more of his time with Alice and Penny now. Brakebills had an eleven-o’clock lights-out policy for First Years, but with their extra workload the three of them had to find a way around it. Fortunately there was a small study off one of the student wings that, according to Brakebills lore, was exempt from whatever monitoring spells the faculty used to enforce curfew. Probably they left it like that deliberately as a loophole for situations like this. It was a leftover space—musty, windowless, and trapezoidal—but it had a couch and a table and chairs, and the faculty never checked it after hours, so that was where Quentin, Alice, and Penny went when the rest of the First Years went to bed.
They made an odd little tribe: Alice sitting hunched over the table; Quentin sprawled on the couch; Penny pacing in circles, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. The odious Popper books were hexed in such a way that you could practice in front of them and they would tell you if you’d screwed up or not by turning green (good) or red (bad), although annoyingly they wouldn’t tell you how you’d screwed up.
But Alice always knew how you screwed up. Of the three of them she was the prodigy, with preternaturally flexible hands and wrists and a freakish memory. When it came to languages she was omnivorous and insatiable. While her classmates were still wallowing in the shallows of Middle English, she was already plunging into Arabic and Aramaic and Old High Dutch and Old Church Slavonic. She was still painfully shy, but the late nights she spent with Quentin and Penny in the after-hours room wore away some of her reserve, to the point where she would sometimes exchange notes and pointers with the other two. Once in a while she even revealed a sense of humor, though more often than not she made her jokes in Old Church Slavonic.
They probably would have been lost on Penny anyway. He had no sense of humor at all. He practiced by himself, murmuring and watching his pale hands sign and flutter in a massive baroque gilt-framed mirror leaned up against the wall. The mirror had an old, fading, forgotten enchantment on it, so Penny’s reflection was sometimes replaced with an image of a treeless green hillside, a smooth grassy curve under an overcast sky. It was like a TV with a poorly installed cable box, picking up a stray image from far away, some other world.
Rather than take a break, Penny would just wait silently and impassively for the image to change back. Secretly the mirror made Quentin nervous, as if something horrible were about to come strolling over the top of that hill, or was buried restlessly underneath it.
“I wonder where it is,” Alice said. “In real life.”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “Maybe it’s in Fillory.”
“You could climb through. That’s always how it works in the books.”
“How great would that be? Think about it: we could go through and study for a month and come back and ace this thing.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to go to Fillory so you can get more homework