“I was thinking of trying to talk to the Thames dragon about it,” Eliot said airily one afternoon. They were sitting on the floor in the library. It was too hot for chairs.
“The who?” Quentin said.
“You think he would see you?” Josh asked.
“You never know till you ask.”
“Wait a minute,” Quentin said. “Who or what is the Thames dragon?”
“The Thames dragon,” Eliot said. “You know. The dragon who lives in the Thames. I’m sure he has another name, a dragon name, but I doubt we could pronounce it.”
“What are you saying.” Quentin looked around for help. “An actual dragon? Are you saying there are real dragons?” He hadn’t quite reached the point where he always knew when he was being made fun of.
“Come on, Quentin,” Janet scoffed. They’d gotten to the part of Push where they flipped cards across the room into a hat. They were using a mixing bowl from the kitchen.
“I’m not kidding.”
“You really don’t know? Didn’t you read the McCabe?” Alice looked at him incredulously. “It was in Meerck’s class.”
“No, I did not read the McCabe,” Quentin said. He didn’t know whether to be angry or excited. “You could have just told me there were real dragons.”
She sniffed. “It never came up.”
Apparently there really were such things as dragons, though they were rare, and most of them were water dragons, solitary creatures who rarely broke the surface and spent a lot of their time asleep, buried in river mud. There was one—no more—in each of the world’s major rivers, and being smart and practically immortal, they tended to stash away all kinds of odd bits of wisdom. The Thames dragon was not as sociable as the Ganges dragon, the Mississippi dragon, or the Neva dragon, but it was said to be much smarter and more interesting. The Hudson River had a dragon of its own—it spent most of its time curled up in a deep, shadowy eddy less than a mile from the Brakebills boathouse. It hadn’t been seen for almost a century. The largest and oldest known dragon was a colossal white who lived coiled up inside a huge freshwater aquifer under the Antarctic ice cap, and who had never once in recorded history spoken to anyone, not even its own kind.
“But you really think the Thames dragon is going to give you free career advice?” Josh said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Eliot said. “Dragons are so weird about these things. You want to ask them deep, profound questions, like where does magic come from, or are there aliens, or what are the next ten Mersenne primes, and half the time they just want to play Chinese checkers.”
“I love Chinese checkers!” Janet said.
“Well, okay, maybe you should go talk to the Thames dragon,” Eliot said irritably.
“Maybe I will,” she said happily. “I think we’d have a lot to talk about.”
Quentin felt like all the Physical Kids were falling in love with each other, not just him and Alice, or at least with who they were when they were around each other. In the mornings they slept late. In the afternoons they played pool and boated on the Hudson and interpreted each other’s dreams and debated meaningless points of magical technique. They discussed the varying intensities and timbres of their hangovers. There was an ongoing competition, hotly contested, as to who could make the single most boring observation.
Josh was teaching himself to play the rinky-tink upright piano in the upstairs hallway, and they lay on the grass and listened to his halting rendition of “Heart and Soul,” over and over and over again. It should have been annoying, but somehow it wasn’t.
By this point they had thoroughly co-opted the butler, Chambers, who regularly furnished them with extra-special bottles from the Brakebills cellars, which were overcrowded anyway and needed to be drunk up. Eliot was the only one with any real sophistication in oenological matters, and he tried to teach the rest of them, but Quentin’s tolerance was low, and he refused to spit as a matter of principle, so he just ended up getting drunk every night and forgetting whatever he was supposed to be learning and starting over from scratch the next night. Every morning when he woke up it seemed impossible that he could ever consume another drop of alcohol, but that conviction had always evaporated by five o’clock in the afternoon.
One afternoon all five of them were sitting cross-legged in a circle in the vast empty middle of the Sea. It was a baking hot summer day, and they had gone out there with the intention of attempting a ridiculously elaborate piece of collaborative magic, a five-person spell that, if it worked, would sharpen their vision and hearing and increase their physical strength for a couple of hours. It was Viking magic, battlefield magic designed for a raiding party, and as far as any of them knew it hadn’t been tried in roughly a millennium. Josh, who was directing their efforts, confessed that he wasn’t completely sure it had ever worked in the first place. Those Viking shamans did a lot of for empty boasting.
