Quentin woke up in a bare white bedroom. He could not have guessed to the nearest twenty-four hours how long he’d been asleep. His chest and arms felt bruised and achy. He looked at his crude, pink, human hands, with their stubby featherless fingers. He brought them up to touch his face. He sighed and resigned himself to being a man again.
There was very little in the bedroom, and all of it was white: the bedclothes, the whitewashed walls, the coarse drawstring pajamas he wore, the white-painted iron bedstead, the slippers waiting for him on the cold stone floor. From the small square window Quentin could see he was on the second floor. His view was of broken snowfields beneath a white sky, stretching out to the horizon, a meaningless abstract white line an unjudgable distance away. My God. What had he gotten himself into?
Quentin shuffled out into the corridor, still in his pajamas and a thin robe he’d found hanging on a hook on the back of the door. He found his way downstairs into a quiet, airy hall with a timbered ceiling; it was identical to the dining hall at Brakebills, but the vibe was different, more like an Alpine ski lodge. A long table with benches ran most of the length of the hall.
Quentin sat down. A man sat alone at one end of the table, nursing a mug of coffee and staring bleakly at the picked-over remains of a lavish breakfast. He was sandy-haired, tall but round-shouldered, with a weak chin and the beginnings of a paunch. His dressing gown was much whiter and fluffier than Quentin’s. His eyes were a pale, watery green.
“I let you sleep,” he said. “Most of the others are already up.”
“Thanks.” Quentin scooched down the bench to sit across from him. He rummaged through the leftover plates and dishes for a clean fork.
“You are at Brakebills South.” The man’s voice was oddly flat, with a slight Russian accent, and he didn’t look directly at Quentin when he talked. “We are about five hundred miles from the South Pole. You flew in over the Bellingshausen Sea on your way in from Chile, over a region called Ellsworth Land. They call this part of Antarctica Marie Byrd Land. Admiral Byrd named it after his wife.”
He scratched his tousled hair unself-consciously.
“Where’s everybody else?” Quentin asked. There didn’t seem to be any point in being formal, since they were both wearing bathrobes. And the cold hash browns were unbelievably good. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was.
“I gave them the morning.” He waved in no particular direction. “Classes begin in the afternoon.”
Quentin nodded, his mouth full.
“What kind of classes?” he managed.
“What kind of classes,” the man repeated. “Here at Brakebills South you will begin your education in magic. Or I suppose you thought that was what you were doing with Professor Fogg?”
Questions like that always confused Quentin, so he resorted to honesty.
“Yes, I did think that.”
“You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think”—his accent made it
It popped out automatically. “Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water.”
“Very good,” he said sarcastically. “Magnificent. You are a genius.”
With an effort Quentin decided not to be stung by this. He was still enjoying the Zen afterglow of having been a goose. And the hash browns.
“Thank you.”
“You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare. You recite it like you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But you do not understand it.”
“I don’t?”
“To become a magician you must do something very different,” the man said. This was clearly his set piece. “You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge
“When a magician casts a spell, he does not first mentally review the Major, Minor, Tertiary, and Quaternary Circumstances. He does not search his soul to determine the phase of the moon, and the nearest body of water, and the last time he wiped his ass. When he wishes to cast a spell he simply casts it. When he wishes to fly, he simply flies. When he wants the dishes done, they simply are.”
The man muttered something, tapped once resonantly on the table, and the dishes began noisily arranging themselves into stacks as if they were magnetized.
“You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart, your
