The Magicians полностью

“Must have been she could still talk, because she got word to her boy that she was in trouble, and he came to her room, and after much preliminary whispering through the keyhole she let him in. And we have to give our boy credit. It must have been bad, very bad, but he stuck by her. She wouldn’t let him go to the faculty—Dunleavy was still Dean, and she would have kicked Emily out without thinking about it.

“So he told her to stay there, don’t move, don’t do anything to make it worse, he would go to the library and see what he could find.

“He came back just before dawn, thinking he had it pretty much worked out. You can imagine the scene. They’d both been up all night. They’re sitting cross-legged on her little bed, her with her scrambled head, him with about eight books open around him on the covers. He’s mixed up a few reagents in cereal bowls from the dining hall. She’s leaning what’s left of her forehead against the wall, trying to keep cool. The blue in the window is getting brighter and brighter, they’ve got to take care of this soon. She’d probably gone past panic and regret at this point. But not past hope.

“But then think about his state of mind. In a way, for him, it was the perfect thing to have happen. This is his golden moment, his chance to be the hero, to save her and win her love, or at least some pity sex. It’s his chance to be strong for her, which is the only thing he’s ever wanted to do.

“But I don’t know, I think he’d had enough time at this point, maybe he’d figured out what was really going on. I’m guessing the dime had finally dropped. She’d taken a terrible chance, and he had to know she hadn’t done it for him.

“Either way he was in no shape to be doing major wizardry. He was tired and scared and in over his head, and I think his heart must have been broken a little, too. Maybe he just wanted it too badly. He launched into the repair spell, which I happen to know which one it was, it was from the Major Arcana, Renaissance stuff. Big energies. It got away from him in the worst possible way. It took him over, took his body away. Right in front of her eyes, he burned up screaming. Blue fire. He became a niffin.”

That’s what Fogg was talking about that night in the infirmary, Quentin thought. About losing control. Apparently the others knew what the word meant, niffin. They stared at Janet like they’d been turned to stone.

“Well. Emily freaked out, I mean freaked out. Barricaded the door, wouldn’t let anybody in until her beloved professor himself showed up. By that point the whole school was awake. I can only imagine how he felt, since in a way the whole thing was his fault. He can’t have been too proud of himself. I suppose he would have had to try to banish the niffin if it didn’t want to leave. I don’t know if even he could have. I don’t think those things really have an upper limit.

“Anyway, he kept his head, kept everybody else out of the room. He put her face back, right there on the spot, which cannot have been easy. Whatever else he was he must have been some magician, because that spell that came through the fountain, that was a nasty piece of work. And she probably twisted it up even more in the casting, too. But he parsed it on the fly and made her reasonably presentable, though I hear she’s never been quite the way she was. Not like she’s deformed or anything, just different. Probably if you hadn’t met her you would never know.

“And that’s pretty much it. I can’t even imagine what they told the boy’s parents. I hear he was from a magical family, so they probably got some version of the truth. But, you know, the clean version.”

There was a long silence. A bell was clanging far away, a boat on the river. The shadow from the trees had flooded all the way over them, deliciously cool in the late-summer afternoon.

Alice cleared her throat. “What happened to the professor?”

“You haven’t figured it out?” Janet didn’t bother to conceal her glee. “They gave him a choice: resign in disgrace . . . or transfer to Antarctica. Brakebills South. Guess which one he took.”

“Oh my God,” Josh said. “It was Mayakovsky.”

“That explains a hell of a lot,” Quentin said.

“Doesn’t it though? Doesn’t it just?”

“So what happened to Emily Greenstreet?” Alice asked. “She just left school?” There was a trace of ground steel in her voice. Quentin wasn’t totally sure where it was coming from. “What happened to her? Did they send her to a normal school?”

“I hear she does something businessy in Manhattan,” Janet said. “They set her up with an easy corporate job, I don’t know, management consulting or something. We own part of some big firm. Lots of magic to cover up the fact that she doesn’t do anything. She just sits in an office and surfs the Web all day. I think part of her just didn’t survive what happened, you know?”