She placed a bronze scarab in each of his hands and asked him to recite the alphabet, first in Greek, then in Hebrew, which he had to be prompted on, while she studied him through what looked like a many-crooked collapsible telescope. He could feel the metal beetles crackling and buzzing with old spells. He had a horrible fear that their little legs would suddenly start wriggling. Occasionally she would stop and have him repeat a letter while she adjusted the instrument by means of protruding screws.
“Mm,” she said. “Uh-huh.”
She produced a tiny bonsai fir tree and made him stare at it from different angles while it ruffled its tiny needles in response to a wind that wasn’t there. Afterward she took the tree aside and conferred with it privately.
“Well, you’re not an herbalist!” she said.
Over the next hour she tested him in two dozen different ways, only a few of which he understood the point of. He ran through basic First Year spells while she watched and measured their effectiveness with a battery of instruments. She had him read an incantation while standing next to a large brass clock with seven hands, one of which circled its face backward and with disconcerting speed. She sighed heavily. Several times she took down sagging, overweight volumes from high shelves and consulted them for long, uncomfortable intervals.
“You’re an interesting case,” she said.
There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.
He sorted pearl buttons of various sizes and colors into different piles while she studied his reflection in a silver mirror. She tried to get him to take a nap so she could pry into his dreams, but he couldn’t fall asleep, so she put him under with one sip of a minty, effervescent potion.
Apparently his dreams didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. She stared at him for a long minute with her hands on her hips.
“Let’s try an experiment,” she said finally, with forced liveliness. She smiled thinly and tucked a stray strand of hair back behind her ear.
Professor Sunderland walked down the length of the room closing the dusty wooden shutters with a clatter until it was dark. Then she cleared the clutter off a gray slate tabletop and boosted herself up onto it. She yanked her skirt down over her knees and motioned for him to sit facing her on the table opposite.
“Go like this,” she said, holding up her hands as if she were about to conduct an invisible orchestra. Unladylike half-moons of sweat bloomed under the arms of her blouse. He went like this.
She led him through a series of gestures familiar to him from Popper, though he’d never seen them put together in quite that combination. She whispered some words he didn’t catch.
“Now go like this.” She flung her hands up over her head.
When she did it, nothing happened. But when Quentin mirrored her, streams of fat white sparks streamed out of his fingertips. It was amazing—it was like they’d been inside him all his life, just waiting for him to wave his hands the right way. They splashed happily out across the ceiling in the dimness and came floating festively down around him, bouncing a few times when they hit the floor and then finally winking out. His hands felt warm and tingly.
The relief was almost unbearable. He did it again and a few more sparks flew out, weaker this time. He watched them trail down around him. The third time he got only one.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” Professor Sunderland said. “I’ll put you down as Undetermined. We’ll try again next year.”
“Next year?” Quentin watched with a rising sense of disappointment as she jumped down off the table and started reopening shutters, window by window. He winced at the sunlight flooding in. “What do you mean? What am I going to do till then?”
“Wait,” she said. “It happens. People put too much importance on these things. Be a darling and send in the next student, would you? We’re already running late, and it’s only noon.”
The summer dragged by in slow motion. It was really the fall, of course, in the world outside Brakebills, and the Brooklyn Quentin came home to for summer vacation was chilly and gray, the streets plastered with wet brown leaves and mashed ginkgo balls that smelled like vomit.
