The Magicians - Lev Grossman [52]
Still dazed, Quentin trailed Eliot into the kitchen, which was, again, larger and nicer than really seemed plausible from the outside, with white cabinets up to the high ceiling and soapstone counters and an aerodynamic-looking 1950s refrigerator. Eliot sloshed some wine from his glass into a pan of red sauce on the stove.
“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.”
He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that he’d ignored Quentin for the past year. It was like it never happened.
“So you have this whole place to yourself?” Quentin didn’t want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here.
“Pretty much. So do you, now.”
“Do all the Disciplines have their own clubhouses?”
“It’s not a clubhouse,” Eliot said sharply. He dumped a huge clump of fresh pasta into a tall pot of boiling water and stirred it to break it up. “This’ll cook in about a minute flat.”
“Then what is it?”
“Well, all right, it is a clubhouse. But don’t call it that. We call it the Cottage. We have the seminars here, and the library isn’t bad. Sometimes Janet paints in the bedroom upstairs. Only we can get in here, you know.”
“What about Fogg?”
“Oh, and Fogg, though he never bothers. And Bigby. You know Bigby, right?”
Quentin shook his head.
“I can’t believe you don’t know Bigby!” Eliot said, chuckling. “God, you’re going to love Bigby.”
He tasted the sauce, then glugged in a slug of heavy cream and stirred it in in widening circles. The sauce paled and thickened. Eliot had a jaunty, off handed confidence at the stove.
“All the groups have a place like this. The Naturals have this deeply lame treehouse off in the forest. The Illusionists have a house just like this one, though only they know where it is. You have to find it to get in. Knowledge just has the library, the poor suckers. And Healing has the clinic—”
“Eliot!” Janet’s voice came from the other room. “We’re starving.” Quentin wondered how Alice was faring out there.
“All right, all right! I hope you don’t mind pasta,” he added, to Quentin. “It’s all I made. There’s bruschetta out there, or there was. At least there’s lots of wine.” He drained the pasta in the sink, sending up a huge gout of steam, and dumped it into the pan to finish in the sauce. “God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?
“Richard was the real cook around here. I don’t know if you knew him, he graduated last year. Tall. Total grind, made us all look bad in front of Bigby, but at least he could cook. Grab those two bottles there, would you? And the corkscrew?”
With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware, some of which bordered on light hand-to-hand weaponry, the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. The food was simple but not at all bad. He’d forgotten he was starving. Janet performed a trick—Quentin wasn’t sure whether it was magical or just mechanical—to shorten the long seminar table into a dinner table.
Janet, Josh, and Eliot gossiped about classes and teachers and who was sleeping with whom and who wanted to sleep with whom. They speculated endlessly about other students’ relative strengths as spellcasters. They maneuvered around one another with the absolute confidence of people who had spent huge amounts of time together, who trusted and loved one another and who knew how to show one another off to best advantage and how to curb each other’s boring and annoying habits. Quentin let the chatter wash over him. Eating a sophisticated meal, alone in their own private dining room, felt very adult. This was it, he thought. He had been an outsider before, but now he had really entered into the