The Magicians - Lev Grossman [98]
“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived, maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily, maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris, maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it?”
A chill settled over the group, where they lay on the sun-warm turf. Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable. When Quentin had first gotten to Brakebills, he’d wondered why everybody didn’t just make themselves ridiculously good-looking. He’d looked at the kids with an obviously flawed feature—like Gretchen with her leg, or Eliot with his twisted jaw—and wondered why they didn’t get somebody to fix them up, like Hermione with her teeth in Harry Potter. But in reality it always ended in disaster.
“Poor Emily,” Janet said. “When she took down the spell that Doris taught her through the fountain, she actually thought she’d found it, the secret technique everybody else had missed. It was elaborate and costly, but it really looked like it might work. After a few weeks of laying the groundwork, she put it together one night by herself in her room.
“How do you think she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw what she’d done to herself?” You could almost hear a note of genuine sympathy in Janet’s hard voice. “I can’t imagine. I really can’t.”
It was late enough in the afternoon now that the shadows from the forest had almost stretched out from the western edge of the Sea far enough to lap at the edge of their blanket.
“Must have been she could still talk, because she got word to her boy that she was in trouble, and he came to her room, and after much preliminary whispering through the keyhole she let him in. And we have to give our boy credit. It must have been bad, very bad, but he stuck by her. She wouldn’t let him go to the faculty—Dunleavy was still Dean, and she would have kicked Emily out without thinking about it.
“So he told her to stay there, don’t move, don’t do anything to make it worse, he would go to the library and see what he could find.
“He came back just before dawn, thinking he had it pretty much worked out. You can imagine the scene. They’d both been up all night. They’re sitting cross-legged on her little bed, her with her scrambled head, him with about eight books open around him on the covers. He’s mixed up a few reagents in cereal bowls from the dining hall. She’s leaning what’s left of her forehead against the wall, trying to keep cool. The blue in the window is getting brighter and brighter, they’ve got to take care of this soon. She’d probably gone past panic and regret at this point. But not past hope.
“But then think about his state of mind. In a way, for him, it was the perfect thing to have happen. This is his golden moment, his chance to be the hero, to save her and win her love, or at least some pity sex. It’s his chance to be strong for her, which is the only thing he’s ever wanted to do.
“But I don’t know, I think he’d had enough time at this point, maybe he’d figured out what was really going on. I’m guessing the dime had finally dropped. She’d taken a terrible chance, and he had to know she hadn’t done it for him.
“Either way he was in no shape to be doing major wizardry. He was tired and scared and in over his head, and I think his heart must have been broken a little, too. Maybe he just wanted it too badly. He launched into the repair spell, which I happen to know which one it was, it was from the Major Arcana, Renaissance stuff. Big energies. It got away from him in the worst possible way. It took him over, took his body away. Right in front of her eyes, he burned up screaming. Blue