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He didn’t feel like packing up his things, didn’t feel like going back to Chesterton, or Brooklyn, or anywhere else for that matter. He didn’t feel like staying, and he didn’t feel like going. He stole a glance at Alice. She looked peaked. He performed a mental search for the love he was accustomed to feel for her and found it strangely absent. If there was anything he wanted at that moment it was to be alone. But he wasn’t going to get that. These were bad thoughts, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t stop the flow, stanch the cerebral hemorrhage. Here he was, a freshly licensed and bonded and accredited magician. He had learned to cast spells, seen the Beast and lived, flown to Antarctica on his own two wings, and returned naked by the sheer force of his magical will. He had an iron demon in his back. Who would ever have thought he could do and have and be all those things and still feel nothing at all? What was he missing? Or was it him? If he wasn’t happy even here, even now, did the flaw lie in him? As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know. I got my heart’s desire, he thought, and there my troubles began.

“I feel like an elderly docent,” Quentin said. “I already forget their names,” Alice said. “They’re like quadruplets.” “We should give them numbers. Tell them it’s a tradition.” “And then we could always call them by the wrong number. Freak them out. Or we could call them all the same thing. Alfred or something.” “Even the girls?” “Especially the girls.” They were sipping tepid leftover champagne. They were getting drunk, but Quentin didn’t care. From the pool room came the glittery tinkle of breaking glass—a champagne flute, probably—and then, a little later, the sound of a sash being raised and somebody throwing up, hopefully out the window. “The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.” “We should have burned this place down,” Alice said gloomily. They were definitely drunk. “Been the last ones out the door and then torched it.” “Then walked away with it burning behind us in the background, like in a movie.” “End of an era. End of an epoch. Which one? Era or epoch? What’s the difference?” Quentin didn’t know. They would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn’t stay here anymore. Couldn’t go back. Only forward.

Sitting in a row on the couch, the Third Years squirmed and sipped their champagne too quickly, like children waiting to be excused. They asked polite questions about the paintings and the Cottage library. Do the books circulate outside the building? Did they really have a first-edition Abecedarian Arcana in the hand of Pseudo-Dionysius himself? Really. And when was the Cottage first constructed? Really! Wow. That’s old. That’s, like, ancient. Then, after a suitable interval, they disappeared en masse into the pool room. They showed no particular desire to be chaperoned there, and Quentin and Alice had no particular desire ever to see them again, so they stayed where they were. As the evening wore on, the sounds of adolescent bonding could be heard. It became apparent to Quentin and Alice that they were relics of an earlier era that had worn out its welcome. They had come full circle. They were outsiders again.

After that even Janet stopped talking. Quentin let himself drift among the clouds. He felt spinny from the wine, like the Earth had come untightened and was wobbling loose on its gimbaled base. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one, because when Josh stood up after a few minutes, he immediately lost his balance and fell over again on the turf. There was scattered applause. But then he stood up again, steadied himself, did a slow, deep knee bend, and executed a perfect standing backflip. He stuck the landing and straightened up, beaming. “It worked,” he said. “I can’t believe it. I take back everything bad I ever said about Viking shamans! It fucking worked!” The spell had worked, though for some reason Josh was the only one who got anything out of it. As they picked up the picnic things and shook the sand out of the blanket, Josh did laps around the field, whooping and making huge superhero leaps in the fading light. “I am a Viking warrior! Cower before my might! Cower! The strength of Thor and all his mighty hosts flows through me! And I fucked your mother! I . . . fucked . . . your . . . motherrrrrrrrrr!” “He’s so happy,” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.”

“We have to have a welters team,” Janet announced one day. “No,” Eliot said, “we don’t.” He lay with one arm over his face on an old leather couch. They were in the library in the Cottage, exhausted from having done nothing all day. “Yes, actually we do, Eliot.” She nudged him sharply in the ribs with her foot. “Bigby told me. There’s a tournament. Everybody has to play. They just haven’t announced it yet.” “Shit,” Eliot, Alice, Josh, and Quentin all said in unison. “I call equipment manager,” Alice added. “Why?” Josh moaned. “Why are they doing this to us? Why, God?” “It’s for morale,” Janet said. “Fogg says our spirits need elevating after last year. Organized welters is part of a ‘return to normalcy.’ ” “My morale was fine until a minute ago. Fuck, I can’t stand that game. It’s a perversion of good magic. A perversion, I say!” Josh waved a finger at nobody in particular. “Too bad, it’s compulsory. And it’s by Discipline, so we’re a team. Even Quentin”—she patted his head—“who still doesn’t have one.” “Thanks for that.” “I vote Janet captain,” Eliot said. “Of course I’m captain. And as captain, it is my happy duty to inform you that your first practice is in fifteen minutes.” Everybody groaned and stirred and then settled themselves more comfortably where they were.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Professor March was addressing him directly. “. . . between a subtropical cyclone and an extratropical? Quentin? In the French, please, if you can.” Quentin blinked. He must have drifted off. “The difference?” he hazarded. “There is no difference?” There was a long, awkward pause, into which Quentin inserted more words in an attempt to find out what exactly the question had been and to say “baroclinic zones” as many times as possible just in case they were relevant.

She was the most visible of the Physical Kids, loud and brusque and always proposing toasts at dinner. She had terrible taste in men—the best that could be said of her endless series of boyfriends is that none of them lasted long. Pretty rather than beautiful, she had a flat, flapperish figure, but she used what she had to maximum advantage—she sent her uniforms back home to be tailored—and there was something vibrantly sexy about her ravenous, too-wide gaze. You wanted to meet it and be devoured by it. 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.