Martin is thirteen years old by now, a pubescent teenager, almost too old to be adventuring in Fillory. In earlier books he was a changeful character, whose moods swung from cheerful to black without warning. In
The Flying Forest
he’s in his depressive phase. It’s not long before he picks a fight with the younger, more dependably sunny Rupert. Some very English yelling and wrestling ensues. The Hotspots clan observes the proceedings with amused leopardly coolth. Breaking away, his shirt untucked and missing a button, Martin shouts at his siblings that it was he who had discovered Fillory, and it was
he
and not
they
who should have gotten to go on the adventure. And it wasn’t fair: Why did they always have to go home afterward? He was a hero in Fillory and nothing at home. Fiona icily tells him not to behave like a child. Martin stalks away into the dense Darkling Woods, weeping wimpy English schoolboy tears.
And then . . . he never returns. Fillory swallows him whole. Martin is absent from the next two books—
A Secret Sea
and the last book in the series,
The Wandering Dune
—and although his siblings hunt for him diligently, they never find him again. (Now it made Quentin think of poor Alice’s brother.) Like most fans Quentin assumed that Plover meant to bring Martin back in the last book of the series, restored and repentant, but Plover died unexpectedly in his fifties while
The Wandering Dune
was still in manuscript, and nothing in his papers ever suggested an answer to the riddle. It was an insoluble literary mystery, like Dickens’s unfinished
Mystery of Edwin Drood
. Martin would always remain the boy who vanished into Fillory and never came back.
Quentin thought the answer might have been in the book he’d possessed so briefly,
The Magicians,
but it was long gone. He’d turned the House inside out and interrogated everybody in it, and by this point he’d given up. Someone at Brakebills must have taken it or tidied it up or lost it. But who, and why? Maybe it hadn’t even been real.
Quentin woke up early that Sunday morning already in fully fledged flight mode. He was spinning his wheels here. He had his new life to get on with. Feeling only the barest required minimum of guilt, he improvised an elaborate fictional confection for his parents—rich roommate, ski chalet in New Hampshire, I know it’s last minute but could he please? More lies, but what could you do, that was how you rolled when you were a secret teenage magician. He packed hurriedly—he’d left most of his clothes at school anyway—and half an hour later he was out on the streets of Brooklyn. He went straight to the old community garden. He walked into the thickest part of it.
He ended up at the back fence, looking through it at the rusting play set in a neighbor’s yard. Could it really be this small? He remembered the garden as practically a forest, but now it looked thin and scraggly. For several minutes he tramped around through the rubble and broken weeds and pumpkin corpses frozen in the act of rotting, back and forth, feeling more and more nervous and embarrassed. What did he do last time? Did he need the book? He must be missing something, but he couldn’t think what. The magic wasn’t happening. He tried to retrace his steps exactly. Maybe it was the wrong time of day.
Quentin went to get a slice of pizza and take stock, praying that nobody he knew would walk by and see him there when he was supposed to be on his way to Mount Alibi in New Hampshire. He didn’t know what to do. The trick wasn’t working. It was all falling away from him. He sat there in a booth with his bags next to him staring at his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors—why do all pizzerias have mirrored walls?—and reading the police blotter in the Park Slope free weekly. The walls reflected each other, mirrors on mirrors, an infinite curving gallery. And as he sat there, the long, narrow, busy room became still around him, almost without his knowing it. The mirrors became dark, the light changed, the bare tile became a polished parquet floor, and when he looked up from the paper again he was eating his slice alone in the junior common room at Brakebills.
Abruptly, with no fuss or ceremony, Alice and Quentin were Second Years. Classes met in a semicircular room in a back corner of the House. It was sunny but terrifyingly cold, and the insides of the tall, paneled windows were permanently iced over. In the mornings they were taught by Professor Petitpoids, an ancient and slightly dotty Haitian woman who wore a pointy black hat and made them address her as “Witch” instead of “Professor.” Half the time when someone asked her a question, she would just say, “An it harm none, do what you will.” But when it came to the practical requirements of working magic, her knobby walnut fingers were even more technically proficient than Professor Sunderland’s. In the afternoons, for P.A., they had Professor Heckler, a long-haired, blue-jawed German who was almost seven feet tall.
There was no particular rush to embrace the two newcomers. The promotion had effectively turned Quentin and Alice into a class of two: the First Years resented them and the Second Years ignored them. Alice wasn’t the star of the show anymore, the Second Years had stars of their own, principally a loud, bluff, broad-shouldered girl with straight dishwater hair named Amanda Orloff who was regularly called on to demonstrate techniques for the class. The daughter of a five-star Army general, she did magic in a gruff, unshowy, devastatingly competent way with her big, blocky hands, as if she were solving an invisible Rubik’s cube. Her thick fingers wrung the magic out of the air by main force.
The other students all assumed Quentin and Alice were friends already, and probably a couple, which in a funny way had the effect of calling into being a bond between them that hadn’t really had time to form yet. They were more comfortable with each other since she’d told him the painful secret of her arrival at Brakebills. She seemed to have been liberated by her late-night confession: she didn’t seem so fragile all the time—she didn’t always speak in that tiny, whispery voice, and he could make fun of her, and with some prompting he could get her to make fun of him, too. He wasn’t sure they were friends, exactly, but she was unfolding a little. He felt like a safecracker who—partly by luck—had sussed out the first digit in a lengthy, arduous combination.
One Sunday afternoon, tired of being shunned, Quentin went and found his old lab partner Surendra and dragged him out of the House for a walk. They wound their way out through the Maze in their overcoats, headed nowhere in particular, neither of them very enthusiastically. The sun was out, but it was still painfully cold. The hedges were heavy with melting ice, and snow was still piled up in the shadowy corners. Surendra was the son of an immensely wealthy Bengali-American computer executive from San Diego. His round, beatific face belied the fact that he was the most brutally sarcastic person Quentin had ever met.
Somehow on their way out to the Sea a Second Year girl named Gretchen attached herself to them. Blond and long-legged and slender, she was built like a prima ballerina except for the fact that she had a severe, clunking limp—something congenital having to do with a knee ligament—and walked with a cane.
“Tally ho, boys.”
“It’s the gimp,” Quentin said.
She wasn’t embarrassed about her leg. She told anybody who would listen that that’s where her power came from, and if she had it surgically corrected she wouldn’t be able to do magic anymore. Nobody knew if it was true or not.
They walked together as far as the edge of the grass, the three of them, then stopped. Maybe this had been a mistake, Quentin thought. None of them seemed to know which way to go, or what they were doing there. Gretchen and Surendra barely knew each other anyway. For a few minutes they talked about nothing—gossip, exams, teachers—but Surendra didn’t get any of the Second Year references, and every time he missed one his sulk deepened. The afternoon wobbled on its axis. Quentin picked up a wet stone and threw it as far as he could. It bounced silently on the grass. The wet made his ungloved hand even colder.
“Walk this way!” Gretchen said finally, and struck off across the Sea at an angle with her weird, rolling gait, which despite its awkwardness covered a lot of ground. Quentin wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh or not. They walked down a narrow gravel path, through a thin scrim of leafless poplar trees, and into a small clearing on the very outer fringe of the grounds.
Quentin had been here before. He was looking at a curious Alice-in-Wonderland playing field laid out in squares, with a broad margin of lawn around it. The squares were about a yard on a side, like a giant chessboard, though the grid was longer than it was wide, and the squares were different materials: water, stone, sand, grass, and two squares made of silvery metal.
The grass squares were neatly trimmed, like a putting green. The water squares were dark, glistening pools reflecting the windblown blue sky overhead.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“What do you mean, what is it,” Surendra said.
“Do you want to play?” Gretchen walked around to the other side of the checkerboard, skirting the field. A tall white-painted wooden chair stood at midfield, like a lifeguard’s chair, or a judge’s chair at a tennis match.
“So this is a game?”
Surendra slit his eyes at him.
“Sometimes I really don’t get you,” he said. It was dawning on him that he knew something Quentin didn’t. Gretchen gave Surendra a conspiratorial look of shared pity. She was one of those people who assumed an attitude of instant intimacy with people she barely knew.
“This,” she said grandly, “is welters!”
Quentin was pretty much resigned to death by scorn. “So it’s a game.”
“Oh, it’s so much more than a game,” Gretchen said.
“It’s a passion,” Surendra said.
“It’s a lifestyle.”
“It’s a state of mind.”
“I can explain it to you, if you have about ten years.” Gretchen blew into her hands. “Basically one team stands at one end and one team stands at the other end and you try to capture squares.”
“How do you capture a square?”
Gretchen waggled her fingers in the air mysteriously. “With
maaaaagic!
”
“Where’s the broomsticks?” Quentin was only half joking.
“No broomsticks. Welters is more like chess. They invented it about fifty million years ago. I think it was originally supposed to be a teaching aid. And some people say it was an alternative to dueling. Students kept killing each other, so they got them playing welters instead.”
“Those were the days.”
Surendra tried a standing long jump over a water square, but he slipped as he took off, shorted it, and caught one heel in the water.
“Shit!” He looked up at the freezing blue sky. “I hate welters!”
A crow took flight from the top of a winter elm. The sun was subsiding behind the trees in a frozen swirl of pink cirrus.
Surendra walked off the board, swinging his arms.
“I can’t feel my fingers. Let’s go in.”
They walked back down the path in the direction of the Sea, not talking, just blowing on their hands and rubbing them together. It was getting even colder as the sun went down. The trees were already black against the sky. They would have to hurry to change for dinner. A powerful feeling of late-afternoon futility was descending on Quentin. A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.
As they crossed the lawn Quentin found himself being quizzed about Eliot.
“So are you really friends with that guy?” Surendra said.
“Yeah, how do you even know him?”
“I don’t really. He mostly hangs out with his own crowd.” Quentin was secretly proud to be connected with Eliot, even if in reality they hardly spoke to each other anymore.
“Yeah, I know,” Surendra said. “The Physical Kids. What a bunch of losers.”
“What do you mean, Physical Kids?”
“You know, that whole clique. Janet Way and the fat one, Josh Hoberman—those guys. They all do physical magic for their Disciplines.”
In the Maze their white breath streamed up against the darkness of the box hedges. Surendra explained that starting with the Third Year students chose a specific magical topic to specialize in, or, more exactly, had it chosen for them by the faculty. Then students were divided into groups based on their specialties.
“It doesn’t matter that much, except that Disciplines map loosely to social groups—people tend to hang out mostly with their own kind. Physical’s supposed to be the rarest. They’re a little snobby about it, I guess. And anyway Eliot, you know about him.”
Gretchen raised her eyebrows and leered. His nose was red from having been out in the cold. By now they had reached the terrace, and the pink sunset was smeared anamorphically all over the wavy glass in the French doors.
“No, I don’t think I do know,” Quentin said stiffly. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“You don’t know?”
“Oh my God!” In ecstasy Gretchen put her hand on Surendra’s arm. “I bet he’s one of Eliot’s—!”
At that moment the French doors opened and Penny came striding quickly toward them, stiff-legged, his shirt untucked, no jacket on. His pale round face came looming up out of the dusk. His expression was blank and fixed, his walk hyperanimated by a crazy energy. As he got closer he took an extra little skip step, cocked his arm back, and punched Quentin in the face.
Fighting was almost unheard of at Brakebills. Students gossiped and politicked and sabotaged one another’s P.A. experiments, but actual physical violence was vanishingly rare. Back in Brooklyn Quentin had seen fights, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who got mixed up in them. He wasn’t a bully, and his height made it inconvenient for bullies to pick on him. He didn’t have any siblings. He hadn’t been seriously punched since elementary school.