But Josh’s inconsistency continued to be a problem. On the morning of the final game of the season, he didn’t show up at all.
It was a Saturday morning in early November, and they were playing for the school championship—what Fogg had grandly christened the Brakebills Cup, although so far he hadn’t produced any actual physical vessel that answered to that name. The grass around the welters field was tricked out with two ranks of grimly festive wooden bleachers that looked like something out of old newsreel footage of college sporting events, and which had probably been lying disassembled in numbered sections in some unimaginably dusty storeroom for decades. There was even a VIP box occupied by Dean Fogg and Professor Van der Weghe, who clutched a coffee cup in her pink-mittened hands.
The sky was gray, and a heavy wind made the leaves seethe in the trees. The gonfalons (in Brakebills blue and brown) strung along the backs of the bleachers fluttered and snapped. The grass was crunchy with frozen dew.
“Where the hell is he?” Quentin jogged in place to keep warm.
“I don’t
“Fuck him, let’s start,” he said. “I want to get this over with.”
“We can’t without Josh,” Alice said firmly.
“Who says we can’t?” Eliot tried to dislodge Janet, who clung to him relentlessly. “We’re better off without him anyway.”
“I’d rather lose with him,” Alice said, “than win without him. Anyway, he’s not dead. I saw him just after breakfast.”
“If he doesn’t show up soon, we’re all going to die of exposure. He’ll be the only one left alive to carry on our glorious fight.”
Josh’s absence made Quentin worried, about what he didn’t know.
“I’ll go find him,” Quentin said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s probably—”
At that moment the officiating faculty member, a hale, brick-colored man named Professor Foxtree, strode up to them wrapped in an ankle-length down parka. Students respected him instinctively because of his easy good humor and because he was tall and Native American.
“What’s the holdup?”
“We’re short a player, sir,” Janet told him. “Josh Hoberman is MIA.”
“So?” Professor Foxtree hugged himself vigorously. His long hooked nose had a drop on the end of it. “Let’s get this shit-show on the road, I’d like to be back in the senior common room by lunchtime. How many do you have?”
“Four, sir.”
“It’ll have to do.”
“Three, actually,” Quentin said. “Sorry, sir, but I have to find Josh. He should be here.”
He didn’t wait for an answer but set off back toward the House at a jog, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up around his ears to block out the cold.
“Come on, Q!” he heard Janet say. And then, disgustedly, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back: “Shit.”
Quentin didn’t know whether to be pissed off at Josh or worried about him, so he was both. Foxtree was right: it wasn’t like the game actually mattered. Maybe the bastard just overslept, he thought as he half-ran over the hard, frosted turf of the Sea. At least he had his fat to keep him warm. The fat bastard.
But Josh wasn’t in his bed. His room was a maelstrom of books and paper and laundry, as usual, some of it floating loosely in midair. Quentin walked down to the sunroom, but its only occupant was the aged Professor Brzezinski, the potions expert, who sat at the window, eyes closed, drenched in sun, his white beard flowing down over a stained old apron. An enormous fly bounced against one of the windowpanes. He looked asleep, but when Quentin was almost out the door he spoke.
“Looking for someone?”
Quentin stopped. “Yes, sir. Josh Hoberman. He’s late for welters.”
“Hoberman. The fat one.”
The old man waved Quentin over with a blue-veined hand and fumbled a colored pencil and a piece of lined paper out of the pocket of his apron. With sure, rapid strokes Professor Brzezinski sketched a rough outline of the Brakebills campus. He muttered a few words in French and made a sign over it with one hand like a compass rose.
He held it up.
“What does this tell you?”
Quentin had expected magical special effects of some kind, but there was nothing. A corner of the map was stained from a coffee spill on the tray.
“Not a lot, sir.”
“Really?” The old man studied the paper for himself, looking puzzled. He smelled like ozone, shattered air, as if he had recently been struck by lightning. “But this really is a very good locator spell. Look again.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“That’s right. And where on campus does even a very good locator spell not work?”
“I have no idea.” Admitting ignorance promptly was the fastest way to get information out of a Brakebills professor.
“Try the library.” Professor Brzezinski closed his eyes again, like an old walrus settling back down onto a sunny rock. “There are so many old seek-and-finds on that room, you can’t find a Goddamned thing.”
