The Magicians - Lev Grossman [55]
Janet was about as annoying as a person could be and still be your friend, but Quentin was never bored around her. She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.
Even though he was part of the Physical Kids now, Quentin still spent most of his time with the other Third Years: he took his classes with them, and worked with them in P.A., and studied for exams with them, and sat with them at dinner. The Maze had been scrambled and redrawn over the summer—as it was every summer, it turned out—and they spent a week’s worth of afternoons relearning it, yelling at one another over the tall hedges when they got lost or found an especially sweet shortcut.
They threw a party in honor of the fall equinox—there was a strong undercurrent of Wiccan sentiment at Brakebills, though hardly anybody took it seriously except the Naturals. They had a bonfire and music and a Wicker Man, and a light show by the Illusionists, and everybody stayed out way too late, their noses running in the cold fall air, their faces hot and red from the fire. Alice and Quentin taught the others the fire-shaping spell, which was a big hit, and Amanda Orloff revealed that she’d been brewing a batch of mead on the sly for the past couple of months. It was sweet and fizzy and disgusting, and they all drank way too much of it and felt like death the next day.
That fall Quentin’s studies changed again. There was less rote learning of gestures and arcane languages, though God knows there was plenty of that, and more actual spellcasting. They spent an entire month on low-level architectural magic: spells to strengthen foundations and rain-proof roofs and keep gutters free of rotting leaves, all of which they practiced on a pathetic little shed barely larger than a doghouse. Just one spell, to make a roof resistant to lightning, took Quentin three days to memorize, grinding the gestures in a mirror to get them exactly right, at the proper speed and with the proper angles and emphasis. And then there was the incantation, which was in a corrupt old Bedouin Arabic and very tricky. And then Professor March conjured a little rainstorm which emitted a single lightning bolt that sheared through it in one eye-searing, ego-demolishing instant, while Quentin stood there getting soaked to the skin.
On alternate Tuesdays Quentin worked with Bigby, the Physical Kids’ unofficial faculty advisor, who turned out be a small man with large liquid eyes and close-cropped gray hair who dressed neatly, if extremely affectedly, in a long Victorian-looking duster. His posture was slightly hunched, but he didn’t seem otherwise frail or crippled. Quentin had the impression that Bigby was a political refugee from somewhere. He was always making vague noises about the conspiracy that had ousted him, and what he would do following his inevitable return to power. He had the stiff, wounded dignity of the deposed intelligentsia.
One afternoon during a seminar—Bigby specialized in ridiculously difficult enchantments that transmuted elements by manipulating their structure on a quantum level—he paused and performed an odd gesture: he reached back behind first one shoulder, then the other, unbuttoning something back there. The movement reminded Quentin of nothing more than a woman unhooking her bra. When Bigby was finished four magnificent insect wings like a dragonfly’s, two on each side, sprang out from behind him. He flexed them with a deep, satisfied sigh.
The wings were gauzy and iridescent. They disappeared for a second in a buzz of activity, then