The Magicians - Lev Grossman [64]
“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.
Dean Fogg arranged an entire tournament schedule of weekend welters matches, culminating in a school championship at the end of the semester. To their surprise the Physical Kids tended to win their games. They even beat the snobby, standoffish Psychic group, who made up for any shortfalls in their spellcasting ability with their uncannily prescient strategic instincts. Their run of success continued through October. Their only real rivals were the Natural Magic group, who in spite of their pacifist, sylvan ethos were annoyingly hyper-competitive about welters.
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,