The Magician’s Land (9 page)

“I’m thinking right now I’d better try to keep my wits about me.”

They watched TV for a minute, a soccer game. The green pitch looked cool and inviting; it was almost a shame it was covered with soccer players. She didn’t seem eager to go first, so he did.

“So how’d they get to you?”

“A letter,” she said. “When I got back to my room that night it was already on my bed. I’m still trying to figure out how they did that. So far it’s the most impressive thing about this whole operation.”

“Are you really sure you want to be here?”

“Of course I don’t want to be here!” Plum snapped. “I want to be back in my damn dormitory, finishing my damn senior year like a normal person! But that’s not going to happen. So.”

“I’m just concerned about the risk.”

“Well, me too. But I don’t happen to have a lot of other choices right now. Don’t worry about it. I’m not your responsibility anymore.”

“I know that.”

“And that’s not your cue to hit on me.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Give me some credit.”

He was pretty sure that it wasn’t really him she was upset with. He wanted to help her. His own transition from Brakebills to the real world hadn’t exactly been graceful either. When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked.

His martini came. A thick curl of gold lemon peel lay sunken in its silvery depths; it had spread a thin oily sheen across the surface. He drank quickly, before it had a chance to warm up.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Plum said. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. God knows this isn’t your fault. It’s just—I’m having trouble.” She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t told my parents what happened yet. I don’t know how to do it. Brakebills was a big, big deal to them. I guess they’re kind of overinvested in me. I’m an only child.”

“Do you want me to talk to them?”

“Hmm.” She sized him up. “No, I don’t think that’s going to help.”

“I’m an only child too. Though my parents were more like underinvested in me.”

“Right, see, but for me, it’s going to mess them up.”

“But it’s good that they care,” Quentin said. “I don’t want to sound like a Pollyanna, but if they really love you they’ll love you whatever happens.”

“Oh, they’ll love me.” Plum’s voice was rising again. “They’ll love me, all right! They’ll just spend the rest of their lives looking at me like a sick bird with a broken wing that will never get better!”

She sucked fiercely at her mineral water through a straw. Then she went on:

“I don’t know. Anyway, this came along and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I thought I’d take a look, and here I am taking it. It’s different, anyway. What about you?”

“Similar,” Quentin said. “I got a letter. I was going to ignore it, but
then I found myself suddenly without employment. I was curious. And here we are.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I do feel some responsibility for that.”

“Forget about it.”

“I just—”

“Seriously, forget it. I made my own choices.”

He said it without heat. It was the truth.

“So do you think we can pull this thing off?”

“I have no idea,” Quentin said. “That bird is spending a lot of money. It has to be reasonably confident.”

“Or reasonably desperate.”

Quentin could feel the martini doing its wintery work, frosting over his mind, silvering over his frontal lobes, preparing the ground for a proper hard freeze. He hadn’t eaten dinner, and it was coming on fast. He thought he might just order another one.

“Do you miss Brakebills?”

She didn’t look at him. On TV, a headed ball pinged off the crossbar.

“Of course I do,” he said. “All the time. But I’m getting used to it. It’s not the worst feeling in the world. And there’s a lot more to life than school. I’m trying to make the most of it.”

“Now you do sound like a Pollyanna.”

Quentin grinned. It was pretty clear that Plum was going to get through this—she was young and unworldly but she was also very tough. And very smart. Maybe they could help each other. He caught the bartender’s eye and tapped his glass.

“I’ll tell you what I’m wondering about,” he said. “I’m wondering about how we’re going to get that suitcase open, if the Couple can’t.”

“I have a theory about that. I don’t think you’ll like it though.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like it,” Plum said. “There’s something about me you should probably—”

“Chochachos!”
Somebody clapped them both on the shoulder at the same time. It was Stoppard. “What are we drinking?”

He looked happy the way only somebody who was inebriated for the first time in his life could be happy. It was incredible that they were even
serving him here, considering that he was both underage and overdrunk. He frowned at them blearily.

“Wait,” he said. “You two know each other or something? From before?”

“You could say that,” Quentin said.

“It’s not what you think,” said Plum.

“Uh-huh.” Stoppard leered knowingly.

“It really isn’t.”

“I just ruined his life, that’s all,” Plum said. “And mine. And I think maybe I’ll have that drink now after all.”

Y
ou could say it all started out as an innocent prank, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. Even Plum had to admit it wasn’t all that innocent. And maybe, deep down, that was why she did it.

Plum was president of the League, unelected but undisputed, and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, though since Brakebills had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been another League at some point in the past, or at any rate something along the same general lines.

You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in actual fact she got the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.

The thing was this: Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he would have to be pranked for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer for his crimes. You couldn’t call it innocent, but you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, was there even any such thing as an innocent prank?

Plum loved Brakebills. It was November of her senior year and she still wasn’t sick of it, not a bit. She loved its many and varied and intricate traditions and rituals and mythologies with an unironic and boosterish love that she refused to be embarrassed about. If anything she
thought there should be more of them, which was one reason she started the League.

They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as Plum could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. She lay full length on her back on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered around the room on couches and chairs, limp and spent, like confetti from a successful but exhausting party that everybody was kind of relieved was now all but over.

Plum made the room go silent—it was a little spell that ate sound in about a ten-yard radius. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said gravely. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”

The
ayes
came back in a range of tones: righteous zeal, ironic detachment, sleepy acquiescence. From Plum’s vantage point on the floor, with her eyes closed, her long brown hair splayed out in a fan on the carpet, which had once been soft and woolly but which had been trodden down into a shiny hard-packed gray, it sounded more or less unanimous.

She dispensed with a show of
nays.
They were doing this. Wharton’s crime was not a matter of life and death, but a stop would be put to it, this the League swore.

Darcy, sitting slumped down on the couch, studied her reflection in a long mirror with a scarred gilt frame. She had a big poufy 1970s afro; it even had an afro pick sticking out of it. She toyed with her image in the mirror—with both of her long, elegant brown hands she worked a spell that stretched it and then squished it, stretched then squished, stretch, squish. Her head blew up to the size of a beach ball; it stretched out like a sausage balloon. The technicalities were beyond Plum, but then mirror-magic was Darcy’s discipline. It was a bit show-offy of her, but it’s not like Darcy had a lot of opportunities to use it.

The facts of the Wharton case were as follows. At Brakebills most serving duties at dinner were carried out by First Years, who then ate separately afterward. But by tradition one favored Fourth Year was
chosen every year to serve as wine steward, in charge of pairings and pourings and whatnot, and trusted with the key to the wine closet. Wharton had had this honor bestowed upon him, and not for no reason. He did know a lot about wine; or at any rate he could remember the names of a whole lot of different regions and appellations and whatever else.

But in the judgment of the League Wharton had sinned against the honor of his office, sinned most grievously, by systematically short-pouring the wine, especially for the Fifth Years (the
Finns,
in Brakebills parlance), who were allowed two glasses each with dinner.

Seriously, these were like two-thirds pours. Everybody agreed. Plum wasn’t much of a drinker personally, but the League took any threat to its wine supply seriously. For such a crime there could be no forgiveness.

“What do you suppose he does with it all?” Emma said.

“Does with what?”

“All that extra wine. He must be skimming it off. I bet he ends up with an extra bottle every night, off the books.”

There were eight girls in the League, of whom six were present. Emma was the only Second Year.

“I dunno,” Plum said. “I guess he drinks it.”

“He couldn’t get through a bottle a night,” Darcy said.

“He and his boyfriend then. What’s his name, it’s Greek.”

“Epifanio.” Darcy and Chelsea said it together.

Chelsea lay on the couch at the opposite end from Darcy, knees drawn up, lazily trying to mess up Darcy’s mirror tricks. It was always easier to screw up somebody else’s spell than it was to cast one yourself. That was one of the many small unfairnesses of magic.

Darcy frowned and concentrated harder, pushing back. The interference caused an audible buzz, and under the stress Darcy’s reflection twisted and spiraled in on itself.

“Stop,” she said. “You’re going to break it.”

“He’s probably got some permanent spell running that eats it up,” Emma said. “Has to feed it wine once a day. Like a virility thing.”

“Wait,” Plum said, “you’re suggesting that Wharton has a wine-powered spell going twenty-four-seven on his penis?”

“Well.” Emma flushed mauve. She’d overstepped herself in the presence of her elders and betters. “You know. He’s so buff.”

While everybody else was distracted by the question of Wharton’s virility Chelsea caused Darcy’s reflection to collapse in on itself, creepily, like it had gotten sucked into a black hole, and then to vanish altogether. In the mirror it looked like she wasn’t even there, except that the couch cushion was slightly depressed.

“Ha,” Chelsea said.

“Buff does
not
mean virile.” That was Lucy, a pale and intensely philosophical Finn; her tone betrayed a touch of what might have been the bitterness of personal experience. “Anyway I bet he gives it to the ghost.”

“There is no ghost,” Darcy said.

Somebody was always saying that Brakebills had a ghost. It was a thing this year—there was practically a cult around it. Emma claimed to have seen it once, watching her through a window; Wharton said he had too.

Plum secretly wanted a ghost sighting of her own, but you could never find it when you were looking for it. She wasn’t completely convinced it existed. It was like saying there used to be a League, no one could prove it either way.

“Come to that,” Chelsea said, “what
does
virile mean?”

“Means he’s got spunk in his junk,” Darcy said.

“Girls, please!” Plum said. “Neither Wharton’s spunk nor his junk is germane here. The question is what to do about the missing wine. Who’s got a plan?”

“
You’ve
got a plan,” Darcy and Chelsea said at the same time, again. The two of them were like stage twins.

It was true, Plum always had a plan. Her brain just seemed to secrete them naturally, leaving her no choice but to share them with the world around her. She had a bit of a manic streak.

Plum’s plan was to take advantage of what she perceived to be Wharton’s Achilles’ heel, which was his pencils. He didn’t use the school-issued ones, which as far as Plum was concerned were entirely functional and sufficient unto the day: deep Brakebills blue in color, with
BRAKEBILLS
in gold letters down the side. But Wharton didn’t like them—he said
they were too fat, he didn’t like their “hand-feel.” The lead was mushy. He brought his own from home instead, very expensive ones.

In truth Wharton’s personal pencils were remarkable: olive green and made from some hard, oily, aromatic wood that released a waxy aroma reminiscent of distant exotic rainforest trees. The erasers were bound in rings of a dull-gray brushed steel that looked too industrial and high-carbon for the task of merely containing the erasers, which were, instead of the usual fleshy pink, a light-devouring black. He kept them in a flat silver case like a cigarette case, which also contained (in its own crushed-velvet nest) a little knife that he used to keep them sharpened to wicked points.

Plus he must have been into debate or academic decathlon or something in some earlier stage of his life, because he was always doing these pencil-tricks with them, of the kind generally used to intimidate rival mathletes. He did them constantly, unconsciously and apparently involuntarily. It was annoying.

Plum’s plan was for the League to steal the pencils and hold them for ransom, the ransom being an explanation of what the hell Wharton did with all that wine, along with a pledge to stop doing same. By 11:30 that night the League was yawning, and Darcy and Chelsea had restored Darcy’s reflection and then begun wrangling with it all over again, but the groundwork had been laid. The plan had been fully explained, fleshed out, approved, improved, and then made needlessly complex. Cruel, curly little barbs had been added to it, and all roles had been assigned.

It was rough justice, but someone had to enforce order at Brakebills, and if the faculty didn’t then the League’s many hands were forced. The administration might turn a blind eye, if it chose, but the League’s many eyes were sharp and unblinking.

Darcy’s image shivered and blurred, trapped between spell and counterspell like a teacup in a vise.

“Stop it,” Darcy said, really annoyed now. “I told you—”

She had told her, and now it did: the mirror broke with a loud sharp
tick,
like one forward increment of a clock’s works. A shatter-white star appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the glass, surrounded by concentric rings and spreading fracture-tendrils. For some reason it
made Plum uncomfortable—for a moment she felt like the little room was a bathysphere that had reached crush depth, the windows were cracking, and the cold, heavy, mindless ocean was about to come pouring in . . .

“Oh, shit!” Chelsea said. Her hands flew to her mouth. “I hope that wasn’t, like, super expensive!”

—

Plum got up at eight the next morning, late by her standards, but instead of rejuvenating her brain the extra sleep had just made it all muzzy. It had smeared all those clear thoughts she was supposed to be having all over the inside of her skull. Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.

As a Finn who’d finished her required coursework Plum was taking all seminars that semester, and her first class was a colloquium on period magic, fifteenth-century Continental to be specific—lots of elemental stuff and weird divination techniques and Johannes Hartlieb. Holly—a fellow Leaguer, moon-faced and pretty, except for one ear which was covered in a port-wine birthmark—sat opposite her across the table, and such was Plum’s smeary state that Holly had to touch her sharp little nose meaningfully, twice, before Plum remembered that that was the signal that Stages One and Two of the plan had been completed successfully.

Stage One: “Crude but Effective.” A few hours earlier Chelsea’s boyfriend would have smuggled her into the Boys’ Tower under pretense of a predawn sex date. Nature having taken its course, Chelsea would have gone to Wharton’s door, pressed her back against it, touched her fingers to her temples in a gesture so habitual that she no longer knew she did it, rolled her eyes back into her head and entered his room in a wispy, silvery, astral state. Chelsea did it all the time—astral projection was her discipline—but it was still one of the most flat-out beautiful pieces of magic Plum had ever seen. Chelsea tossed his room for the pencil case, found it and grasped it with both of her barely substantial hands. She
couldn’t get the pencil case out of the room that way, but she didn’t have to. All she had to do was lift it up to where it could be seen in the window.

Wharton himself might or might not have been watching this, depending on whether or not he was asleep, but it mattered not.
Let him see.

Because once Chelsea got the case over by the window, earnest Lucy had line of sight to it from a window in an empty lecture hall in the wing opposite Wharton’s room, which meant she could teleport the pencil case in that direction, from inside Wharton’s room to midair outside it. Three feet was about as far as she could jump it, but that was plenty. Thank God for people with actual useful disciplines.

The pencil case would then fall forty feet to where Emma waited shivering in the bushes in the cold November predawn to catch it in a blanket. No magic required.

Effective? Undeniably. Needlessly complex? Perhaps. But needless complexity was the League’s signature. That was how the League rolled.

Then it was on to Stage Two: “Breakfast of Champions.” Wharton would descend late, having spent the morning frantically searching his room. Through a fog of anxiety he would barely notice that his morning oatmeal had been plunked down in front of him not by some anonymous First Year but by the purple-eared Holly in guise of same. The first mouthful would not sit right with him. He would stop and examine his morning oatmeal more closely.

It would be garnished, not with the usual generous pinches of brown sugar, but with a light dusting of aromatic, olive-green pencil shavings. Compliments of the League.

—

As the day wore on Plum got into the spirit of the prank. She’d known she would. It was mostly just her mornings that were bad. It took a lot of energy to keep being Plum. Some days she just needed a few hours to get up to speed.

Her schedule ground forward: Accelerated Advanced Kinetics; Quantum Gramarye; Joined-Hands Tandem Magicks; Manipulation of
Ligneous Plants. Plum’s course-load would have been daunting for a doctoral candidate, possibly several doctoral candidates, but Plum had arrived at Brakebills with a head full of more magical theory and practice than most people left with. She wasn’t one of these standing-starters, the cold-openers, who reeled through their first year with aching hands and eyes full of stars. Plum was clever, and Plum had come to Brakebills prepared.