When he got close enough Mayakovsky caught him. The tall man grunted, wrapping the heavy, scratchy blanket around him, and swung him down to the snow. Quentin’s legs kept moving for a few seconds, then he lay still, panting, on his side, twitching like a netted fish. It was the first time in nine days that he’d stopped running. The sky spun. He retched.
Mayakovsky stood over him.
“
There was something odd in Mayakovsky’s voice. The sneer was gone, and it was thick with emotion. A twisted smile revealed for a moment the older wizard’s yellow teeth in his unshaven face. He hauled Quentin to his feet with one hand; the other hand he flourished, and a portal appeared in the air. He shoved Quentin unceremoniously through it.
Quentin staggered and fell into a psychedelic riot of green that assaulted him so violently that at first he didn’t recognize it as the rear terrace of Brakebills on a hot summer day. After the blankness of the polar ice the campus was a hallucinatory swirl of sound and color and warmth. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. He was home.
He rolled over on his back on the baking smooth stone. Birds sang deafeningly. He opened his eyes. A sight even stranger than the trees and the grass met them: looking back through the portal, he could still see the tall, soft-shouldered magician standing there with Antarctica in the background. Snow kicked up around him. A few stray crystals drifted through and evaporated in midflight. It looked like a painting executed on an oval panel and hung in midair. But the magical window was already closing. He must be preparing himself to go back to his empty polar mansion, Quentin thought. He waved, but Mayakovsky wasn’t looking at him. He was looking out at the Maze and the rest of the Brakebills campus. The unguarded longing on his face was so excruciating Quentin had to look away.
Then the portal closed. It was over. It was late May, and the air was full of pollen. After the rarefied atmosphere of Antarctica it tasted hot and thick as soup. It was a lot like that first day he’d come to Brakebills, straight through from that frigid Brooklyn afternoon. The sun beat down. He sneezed.
They were all waiting for him, or almost all: Eliot and Josh and Janet, at least, wearing their old school uniforms, looking fat and happy and relaxed and none the worse for wear, like they’d done nothing for the past six months but sit on their asses and eat grilled cheese sandwiches.
“Welcome back,” Eliot said. He was munching a yellow pear. “They only told us ten minutes ago you might be coming through.”
“Wow.” Josh’s eyes were round. “Man, you look skinny. Wizard needs food badly. And also maybe a shower.”
Quentin knew he had only a minute or two before he burst into tears and passed out. He still had Mayakovsky’s scratchy wool blanket wrapped around him. He looked down at his pale, frozen feet. Nothing looked frostbitten, anyway, though one of his toes was sticking out at an angle. It didn’t hurt yet.
It was very, very comfortable, deliriously comfortable, lying on his back on the hot stone like this, with the others looking down at him. He knew he should probably get up, for the sake of politeness if for no other reason, but he didn’t feel like moving yet. He thought he might just stay where he was for another minute. He had earned himself a rest.
“Are you all right?” Josh said. “What was it like?”
“Alice kicked your ass,” Janet said. “She got back two days ago. She already went home.”
“You were out there a week and a half,” Eliot said. “We were worried about you.”
Why did they keep talking? If he could just gaze up at them in silence, that would be perfect. Just look at them and listen to the chirping birds and feel the warm flagstones holding him up. And maybe somebody could get him a glass of water, he was desperately thirsty. He tried to articulate this last sentiment, but his throat was dry and cracked. He wound up just making a tiny creaking noise.
“Oh, I think he wants to know about us,” Janet said. She took a bite of Eliot’s pear. “Yeah, nobody else went out but you two. What—you think we’re stupid?”
Quentin didn’t spend any time in Brooklyn that summer because his parents didn’t live there anymore. Abruptly and without consulting him, they’d sold off their Park Slope town house for a colossal sum and semiretired to a faux-Colonial McMansion in a placid suburb of Boston called Chesterton, where Quentin’s mother could paint full time and his father could do God only knew what.
