But all that came much later. Lying on the floor after the attack, the agony fading from his arms and legs and back, Quentin felt only good things. He felt relieved to be alive. Disaster had been averted. He had made a terrible mistake, but everything was all right now. He felt a profound gratitude for the old, splintery wooden underside of the chair he was looking up at. It was fascinating and beautiful. He could have looked at it forever. It was even a little thrilling to have been through something like that and lived to tell about it. In a way he was a hero. He breathed deeply and felt the good solid floor under his back. The first thing he wanted to do, he realized, was to put his hand reassuringly on Alice’s warm soft ankle, which was next to his head. He was so grateful to be able to finally look at her again.
He didn’t know yet that Amanda Orloff was dead. The Beast had eaten her alive.
The rest of Quentin’s Third Year at Brakebills went by beneath a gray watercolor wash of quasi-military vigilance. In the weeks that followed the attack the school was locked down both physically and magically. Faculty members wandered the grounds retracing the lines of its ancient defensive spells, renewing and strengthening them and casting new ones. Professor Sunderland spent an entire day walking backward all the way around the school’s perimeter, scattering colored powders on the snow behind her in carefully braided trails, her plump cheeks turning pink with cold. She was followed by Professor Van der Weghe, who checked her work, and preceded by a gaggle of attentive students who cleared brush and fallen logs out of her path and resupplied her with materiel. It had to be done in one unbroken circuit.
Cleansing the auditorium was just a matter of ringing a few bells and burning sage in the corners, but resetting the school’s main wards took a solid week; according to student rumor they were all cinched to an enormous worked-iron totem kept in a secret room at the campus’s exact geographical center, wherever that was, but nobody had ever seen it. Professor March, who after his ordeal never quite lost a certain anxious, hunted look, roamed endlessly in and out of the school’s many basements and sub-basements and cellars and catacombs, where he obsessively tended and reinforced the foundation spells that secured them against attack from below. The Third Years had made a bonfire at their Equinox party, but now the faculty made a real bonfire, fed with specially prepared cedar logs, dried and peeled and as straight as railroad ties, stacked in an arcane, eye-bending configuration like a giant Chinese puzzle that took Professor Heckler all day to get right. When he finally lit it, using a twist of paper with words scribbled on it in Russian, it burned like magnesium. They were discouraged from looking directly at it.
In a way it was an education in itself, a chance to watch real magic being worked, with real things at stake. But there was no fun in it. There was only silence at dinner, and useless anger, and a new kind of dread. One morning they found the room of a First Year boy cleared out; he’d dropped out and gone home overnight. It was not uncommon to come across conclaves of three or four girls—girls who mere weeks earlier had actively avoided sitting next to Amanda Orloff at dinner—perched together on the stony rim of a fountain in the Maze, weeping and shivering. There were two more fights. As soon as he was satisfied that the foundations were taken care of, Professor March went on sabbatical, and those who claimed to know—i.e., Eliot—put the odds of his ever coming back at approximately zero.
Sometimes Quentin wished he could run away, too. He thought he would be shunned for the little joke he’d played on March with the podium, but the strange thing was that nobody said anything about it. He almost wished they would. He didn’t know whether he’d committed the perfect crime or a crime so public and unspeakable that nobody could bring themselves to confront him about it in broad daylight. He was trapped: he couldn’t grieve properly for Amanda because he felt like he’d killed her, and he couldn’t atone for killing her because he couldn’t confess, not even to Alice. He didn’t know how. So instead he kept his little particle of shame and filth inside, where it could fester and turn septic.
